Leaving a job is stressful enough without having to figure out health insurance for the first time, on a deadline, while everything else is up in the air. It's one of the harder things we ask people to do at one of the worst moments to ask them to do it.
And here's what makes it harder. Most health insurance agents make more money when you pick one plan over another.
That's not a scandal. It's just how the industry pays people. Carriers set the commission rates, some plans pay better than others, and the person walking you through your options has a stake in where you land. It's baked into the whole system, and almost nobody outside the industry knows it's there.
Now picture the person on the other end of that call. They just lost their job. They've never bought their own health insurance, because work always handled it. They're staring at a screen full of plans they don't understand, on a deadline, while also figuring out rent and a resume. A friendly expert gets on the phone and recommends a plan. Of course they take the advice. Why wouldn't they?
Here's the thing they can't see: that expert might earn more on the plan they just recommended. Maybe it's the right plan anyway. Maybe it isn't. The person on the phone has no way to tell the difference, and they're in no position to go double-check. The incentive does its quiet work right at the moment they're most vulnerable, and a wrong call on a deductible or a network can cost them thousands.
We didn't want any part of that. So we built our member services team to take the incentive off the table completely.
Our agents are salaried. No commission. No quotas.
There's no plan we pay them to push, because there's no plan that pays them anything. When a departing employee gets on the phone with one of our advisors, the advisor has exactly one job: helping that person find coverage that actually fits their life, their doctors, their budget, and their prescriptions. ACA marketplace, a private plan, COBRA, Medicare, whatever fits. The answer is just the truth.
You'd be surprised how much that changes a conversation.
An agent who isn't getting paid to steer you can tell you when COBRA is the smart move and when it's way more than you need. They can catch the subsidy you qualify for that nobody mentioned. They can say "keep your doctor, here are the two plans that cover her" without quietly weighing what that costs them. When the advice is the whole product, you get the real answer, not the profitable one.
And the support is genuinely good, not just honest. Every When advisor is a licensed broker, appointed with the major carriers: Cigna, UHC, Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield. So they don't just hand someone a list and wish them luck. They can pull up the actual plans, compare them side by side, explain the trade-offs in plain English, and enroll the person right there. No phone tree. No getting bounced between departments. One person who knows insurance and stays with you start to finish.
One of our members said it better than we could. He'd worked in the insurance industry for years, and even he found the marketplace confusing. His advisor gave him just enough context to feel sure about what he picked. If a veteran needs that kind of help, imagine what it means for someone doing this for the very first time.
For employers, this is the part that's easy to undervalue. Move departing employees toward better-fit coverage and you cut your COBRA claims exposure. That math is simple and it shows up in your numbers fast.
The harder thing to put on a spreadsheet is what happens after. Someone leaves your company. They're nervous about coverage. Instead of a packet in the mail, they get a real person who gives them honest help with one of the most stressful decisions of their year, and never once tries to upsell them. That sticks. People talk about how they were treated on the way out. They leave reviews. They send friends your way. The exit turns into a reason to think well of you instead of a reason not to.
A commission model quietly works against all of that. It puts a thumb on the scale at the exact moment your former employee is trusting a stranger with a big decision. Ours can't, because there's no thumb to put on the scale. Our advisors win when the person ends up in the right plan, and only then.
That's the whole point of building it this way. Real help, when people need it most.
