Paduda: Work Comp Disruption and 'the Important vs. the Urgent'

Friday, April 14, 2017 | 0

A very long time ago, a professor in a business school class said, “You have to differentiate between things that are important and things that are urgent.”

Joe Pudada

That may very well be the most valuable lesson I learned in business school, although it’s one I constantly wrestle with.

I bring this to your attention, dear reader, because there’s been a very important series of blog posts sitting in my drafts folder for weeks now. I should have finished and posted them a month ago, but more urgent things kept coming up. Mea culpa.

So enough of my time-management problems. Here’s what’s so important.

Writing in IAIABC’s Perspectives, Jeff White said:

Even more unconventional P2P insurance models are planning to go to market in 2017, some with the intent to cut out the insurance company altogether. Their plan is to initially appeal to the one-third of the U.S. population that is wildly open to sharing money and property, even if they have never met each other in person before. These companies are adopting models taken straight out of the current Fintech playbook using crowdfunding, microfinancing and P2P lending models as their guide.

Jeffrey Austin White is the smartest person I know in work comp. Jeff also has the unique ability to instantly grasp highly technical issues and, more importantly, explain them to the rest of us so that we understand the issue, AND get its implications.

You need to read his article, because it explains precisely what the future— peer-to-peer networks, crowd-funding, blockchain — holds for health care and workers’ comp.

This future has huge implications for buyers, regulators, suppliers and other stakeholders. A few examples:

• Teambrella will push the limits of our current regulatory system by allowing members to cover their own risk using a distributed network based on the blockchain.
• Teambrella’s model will [be] … funded by a closed community of users without a license or the backing of an insurance company, a centralized authority or state regulators. What? Are they allowed to do that?
• Lemonade is one of several new companies, or platforms, that is reinventing mutual insurance, by operating under what is now referred to as a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. This network allows customers to form groups and finance their own claims from a shared pool of funds, with excess covered by a reinsurer. In the true P2P model, money left over in the pool, which would normally be profit for the insurance carrier, is either refunded back to the individual participants, paid forward to the next year’s premiums or, in the case of Lemonade, donated to a charitable organization.
• Several major organizations are currently engaged in an international insurance pilot project based on blockchain technology. Aegon, Allianz, Munich Re, Swiss Re, XL Caplin and Zurich are among 15 companies that recently announced the launch of the Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative, or B3i.

I’m going to dig deep into this in the next post.

Joe Paduda is co-owner of CompPharma, a consortium of pharmacy benefit managers. This column is republished with his permission from his Managed Care Matters blog.