The Troubled Insurance Sales Firm Behind Those Joe Namath Ads for Medicare Advantage

Whether Namath, whose extensive soccer vocation most likely remaining him with Medicare subsidies, has any idea what he’s hawking is unclear he’s not fascinated in talking about it. Or so states his longtime agent, Jim Walsh. “I’m just a attorney,” Walsh reported when he politely informed me he was not “in a position to chat” about his client’s deal. So who is guiding the growing old-star-spangled hotline? TogetherHealth, a Florida-centered insurance plan marketing firm, and its guardian company, Benefytt Technologies, which is much considerably less clean up-slash than its all-American spokesman. Benefytt’s evolution delivers a dizzying tour as a result of the entire world of insurance policies brokers wading into client confusion to offer normally subpar strategies. Seniors are only a single target.


In the summer of 2019, Gavin Southwell was in New York with some of his senior workers, getting traveled from Tampa, Florida, where by he’s the CEO of a organization that generates on the internet platforms for providing insurance policies. Ahead of it rebranded in 2020 to Benefytt Systems, the business was known as Overall health Insurance policy Innovations, and the workforce was headed to Nasdaq Tower in Moments Sq. to ring the opening bell of the buying and selling week.

Inside a glass-walled television studio on the ground floor, David Wicks, a vice president at Nasdaq, known as Southwell to a podium. “Gavin, often the louder the team claps and cheers, the extra the inventory goes up,” Wicks stated, amid cheers from the besuited viewers. Clapping along like a gameshow host, he congratulated the checking out CEO on his company’s the latest acquisition of TogetherHealth. The new subsidiary’s Medicare Protection Helpline, set up in 2017, would allow Well being Insurance policy Innovations to connect seniors with well being insurers. (TogetherHealth’s site currently promises to “partner with the nation’s top Medicare carriers,” which includes Humana, Aetna, and WellCare.)

Since its founding in 2008, Health Insurance policies Improvements experienced speedily expanded its operations, offering on the web sales platforms for a byzantine community of third-bash insurance brokers, together with its personal direct-to-shopper operations. For several years, most of the brokers performing under the company’s umbrella marketed health and life insurance merchandise unrelated to Medicare. Especially common had been small-time period health insurance policies plans—a reduced-cost selection for bridging quick gaps in coverage. For the reason that limited-term wellbeing insurance policies ideas are meant to be just that—short-term—they’re exempt from the minimal coverage specifications of the Cost-effective Care Act, a depth that brokers tended to downplay.