Insurers enlist the Net

Robert Nielsen considers himself a relatively healthy young man who rarely needs medical attention, though he admits he's "not doing anything special" to take care of himself.

The 25-year-old Utahn could easily be considered a "young invincible," a term used in the insurance industry to describe healthy young people who find health insurance largely unnecessary — at least until they're faced with an expensive medical crisis.

Unlike many in that demographic, however, Nielsen recently took it upon himself to find health-care coverage after being uninsured for more than a year. And when the time came, he turned to a place that many people would not think to go: the Internet.

"I figured I could get health insurance online," said Nielsen, who simply typed "health insurance" into a search engine and came up with a national company that contracts with nearly all of the country's leading health insurance carriers.

The company he stumbled upon, eHealth, is the largest online provider of health insurance for individuals, families and small businesses. On its Web site, eHealthInsurance.com, the company offers 125 different plans in Utah, and each has been approved by the state's Department of Insurance.

Without knowing it, Nielsen had tapped into a growing trend by looking beyond the traditional venues for health-care coverage.

"People just don't know that this service exists, they don't even know about the individual family health insurance market," said Sam Gibbs, eHealthInsurance's senior vice president and general manager. "They don't know how to get it; they don't know the cost of it."

A 2005 Department of Health survey of uninsured Utahns appears to bolster Gibbs' statement. Nearly 33 percent of respondents said they lacked health insurance because their employer didn't offer it, and another 27 percent said they had lost their job and, by extension, their benefits.

Nielsen lost his student health insurance after graduating from an Oregon college and taking a position at a small Utah business that didn't offer health-care coverage.

While there are certainly people who just don't think they need health insurance, more and more people are seeking some kind of safety net to protect them against high medical bills if an emergency strikes, Gibbs said. "The trend that we're seeing is that people are saying, 'Well, wait a minute, I don't want to be left in the cold,' so to speak."

Individual health insurance offers people the chance to tailor a plan to meet their needs, such as a high-deductible policy with a low monthly premium for someone with fewer medical needs or a slightly richer plan for those who frequently go to the doctor.