Welcome to Benefitshealthplan.com - Information on Illinois health insurance quotes

In the constantly shifting e-commerce marketplace, significant benefits emerge for those who trade in information-based products. Unlike the tangible products in Amazon's immense online bookstore, raw data needs no warehouse, no brick-and-mortar distribution system. Software is an obvious example of this phenomenon, but, because of its similarly intangible format, insurance also might soon boom as an e-commerce product.

Today, roughly 1.5 percent of insurance policies are sold online, but this is bound to change in the fall of 2002. As of October 16, 2002, the digital world will gain an advantage over pen and paper in that electronic signatures will become just as legally valid as their ink counterparts, negating the major roadblock of selling health insurance online. Because it's inherently faster and cheaper than paper- and snail mail-based processes, e-insurance will likely grow exponentially with the advent of e-signatures.

The Internet is already proving to be a valuable tool for individuals and small businesses shopping for automotive, life, and health insurance policies. Because the Internet crosses regional boundaries and is an ideal medium for aggregating information, it provides a real marketplace for insurance that was available only to agents and brokers in the past.

As big companies tend to have an in-house human resources department and a large labor pool, they generally have both the knowledge and the leverage to navigate the insurance waters without the Web, but a 20-person company is in a different position. Without a full-time HR guru on the payroll, the small business has difficulty keeping up with industry and regulatory trends and has historically relied on an agent for information. However, as dozens of startups and established companies have moved towards the Internet in the past few years, the Web has become a viable source of insurance news, facts, and figures.

For smaller policies (i.e. individual automobile), a customer can often buy a policy online during the day and have it in place by nightfall. For more complicated and regulated policies, like small group health policies, a good deal of traditional interaction -- paper policies and handwritten signatures, namely -- is still required by law. And agents and brokers are still invaluable to novice insurance buyers who have yet to learn the lingo.

But if you're familiar with the ins and outs of insurance, the Internet could bring you some legitimate savings, depending on the relevant legislation in your state. Explains Robert Bland, chairman and founder of Illinois-based Quotesmith.com, Inc., an online price comparison service: "We've designed our auto, life, and health engines for people who are already familiar with insurance issues" and not for first-time buyers.

Originally established long before the dot-com craze (in 1984), Quotesmith.com evolved from a subscription service that provided agents with a way to sort through the morass of insurance quotes. By 1996, consumer interest in the service had reached the level where the company developed its Website to target the individual purchaser and then became a licensed broker specializing in online transactions.

"We own and operate the largest medical insurance databases in the country," Bland says. "We're pretty much in tune to help small businesses from 1 to 20 employees. An interesting tip of advice: A lot of small businesses think they have to buy small group. They might be better off with several individual policies."

As far as savings, he says that a number of insurance providers have taken a cue from the airline industry and started to offer Internet-only policies that can be priced as much as 15 percent less than a traditional policy. "There's more to this than price," Bland was quick to note. Both state laws and preexisting medical conditions can impact the price and availability of insurance; nonetheless, the Web provides a good vehicle for finding policies that might have been impossible to locate in the past.

Beyond Quotesmith.com, there are numerous like-minded insurance portals and quoting services: eHealthInsurance.com, BenefitMall.com, and InsWeb.com, to name just a few. Like Quotesmith, eHealthInsurance offers instant quotes and online applications, but BenefitMall and Ins Web refer you to a broker to complete the transaction.

Until e-signatures become valid for health insurance next year, however, the industry will lag in terms of online focus, says Quotes mith.com's Bland. "The industry is still in love with paper and what we call 'wet' signatures," he explains, adding, "The dam has cracked. A critic will say one percent [of all insurance sales] -- it'll never take off. We say one percent -- what a great opportunity!"

Eric Peterson is a contributing editor to Wearables Business.