Let’s face it: HBO will never make a hit comedy about the hijinks of young professionals in the health insurance industry. Pioneers in our field, even those who’ve started great companies, don’t get biopics written by Aaron Sorkin or wind up with A-list actors portraying them on the screen. Very few college kids daydream in their dorms about one day making it big by doing some magic with deductibles or flexible spending accounts. I get it: we’re not cool.
But we’re in the people business, and lately we’ve begun to figure out something major about the future that other industries, and particularly the infinitely more popular tech sector, should know as well. It’s a far-reaching insight, one in need of much greater study and analysis, but for now, in simple terms, here it goes: the future is going to be narrow.
If that’s a little cryptic, think of Facebook. Part of the vaunted social network’s charm is the ability to give us the feeling that we’re part of a very large circle of people, our so-called friends. We’re following hundreds of people, from our second-grade crush to our co-worker’s cousin’s sister, seeing pictures of their pets or reading about their latest trip to the movies. For the better part of the past decade, many of us—hundreds of millions—were thrilled with this proposition, and understandably so: Facebook connected us with each other and gave us a platform to share and communicate. There was only one problem, as we’re now beginning to realize: these people we follow on Facebook aren’t really our friends.
I don’t mean that they’re perfect strangers or that they mean us any harm. I just mean that they don’t fulfill the much more ancient, and fundamentally human, need for real, deep, and true emotional connection. A friend is a person in whom we confide and whom we trust. How many of our hundreds of Facebook pals meet that standard?
The answer, of course, is not many, which may be why many of us are moving away from social media. As a recent global survey found, time spent on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, social media’s Big Four, has declined this past year, in some cases steeply; the French, for example, spent, on average, 19.8 minutes on Twitter during the first quarter of 2015, and only 13.12 minutes during the same period this year, a 34 percent drop. Twitter usage in the U.S. showed a similar pattern. Several explanations present themselves, but the most obvious one is this: we’re all getting back to narrower networks we can trust.
Which brings me back to us boring folks in health insurance. A while ago, we began experimenting with narrow networks ourselves. The idea went like this: instead of asking consumers to pay a bundle for access to an oversized network of physicians and caregivers they would likely never need, why not try charging significantly more affordable rates and limiting the network to a smaller number of great community-based physicians, including the ones our members would see anyway?
Studying this very question, academics have recently come up with some fascinating findings. Not long ago, for example, two economists—one from MIT, the other from Wellesley—studied state employees in Massachusetts who were incentivized to choose narrow networks. These employees’ health insurance bills, the economists learned, dropped by about a third, a major monthly saving, but the quality of care was not compromised: hospitals in the narrow network performed just as well as those offered by more extensive—and more expensive—programs. In a different study, this one focused on California, narrow networks performed even better than broader ones in some ways, leading researchers to conclude that this approach can give insurers the power to cut all but the best-performing hospitals and physicians from the plans they offer patients.
I’m proud that my company, CareConnect, was among the innovators who helped introduce the idea of the narrow network to many consumers. Now, maybe it’s time for other industries to follow suit. What would a social network look like if it geared its efforts to narrower groups of constituents and focused on quality and intimacy instead of mass appeal? What new applications would pop up to help give us not another bit of convenience but the stuff we really need, like care and empathy and well-being?
These are fascinating questions, but not ones that I know how to answer. I will, however, say this: when you contemplate this narrow new future, remember that you’ve heard about it from the health insurance guys first.