The state health exchange is considering adding new products to its line, such as life insurance, to generate more cash, Connect for Health Colorado executive director Patty Fontneau told lawmakers at a review committee hearing Thursday.
“As our small group (insurance) becomes more robust, often businesses purchase their group life when they purchase their group health,” Fontneau said. “We could consider it and bring it to the board.”
Fontneau said the state exchange would first work with stakeholder and advisory groups before taking any proposal to the board.
“If you (a broker) received a commission, you would receive the same commission if you worked through us,” Fontneau said. “What we hope to do is make it easier, so that if a broker is selling those to a small group they can do it all in one place.”
The comments were made before the Legislative Health Benefit Exchange Implementation Review Committee, where lawmakers have an opportunity to question exchange officials.
“Right now, the only thing we have that the board has looked at and approved is vision (insurance). So right now, they’re selling medical, dental and vision as a package,” Fontneau said.
Sen. Ellen Roberts, R-Durango, said adding group life insurance is starting to go “far afield from what the exchange was set up to do.”
“So I’d like to suggest,” Roberts told Fontneau at the hearing, “that beyond discussing it with your board, you should come back to the legislature and have that discussion here as to whether it’s an appropriate addition to something that was supposed to be a health insurance exchange.”
Roberts later told The Denver Post that with the exchange having been established as an independent nonprofit, the only recourse for legislators might be to run a bill saying the exchange can’t do it.
Roberts said insurance brokers have complained to her that they would consider the exchange’s incursion into life insurance unwanted and unfair competition. ” ‘What’s next,’ a broker asked me. ‘Is it used car sales? Marijuana?’ ” Roberts said.