Source: Brian Keane, Paul Holdren, Susan Novak, Deloitte LLP, September 2008

From the summary:
In the face of relentless health care cost increases, health plans’ historical employer-sponsored (group) market is showing signs of stagnation or decline. Emerging in its place is a new retail market of informed, empowered individual buyers – a 60-million-plus member segment that is conservatively expected to grow at 4 percent annually.

A new report from Deloitte LLP, Profitable Growth in the Emerging Retail Marketplace: Implementing a Target Approach to Health Plan Sales & Marketing, asserts that health plans should respond to and penetrate this growing market. However, the standard sales and marketing “toolkit” – which focuses on wholesale selling to employers – lacks tools to help health plans compete in a retail world.