In recent years, there have been several failed attempts by various associations to get legislation through Congress aimed at permitting them to buy health insurance for their members.

But one group that has been a part of those attempts in the past—the National Assn. of Wholesaler Distributors—has taken matters into its own hands and has recently made health insurance available for its own members.

Late in 2007, the NAW began theNAW Insurance Trust, a group health plan administered by Trustmark Insurance Company. It will be distributed and marketed by Flexible Benefit Service Corporation (Flex).

“We’d tried hard on the legislative end to make this happen in Congress. But there’s so much disagreement as to what to do in health care that we couldn’t move anything forward,” explains George Valiga, vice president and general manager of NAW’s Service Corp.

The program takes advantage of NAW’s collective buying power. Members will have a choice of a number of plans with flexible options, including Health Savings Accounts.

“Basically it’s a partnership with the insurance company,” Valiga explains. “What’s different is we don’t have the ability to work other partners into the deal. This is something we [NAW] had to do ourselves. Normally, we’d reach out to other associations to get them to join in with us. But here, we can’t ask another group to piggyback in with us.”

The NAW plan has 18 options that are PPO-oriented. But participants are also told about the HSAs that are available and what those HSA plans could potentially do for them.

“You can choose the plan you like,” Valiga says. “And you’ll then be offered an alternative, saying, 'Here’s what would happen if an HSA was applied on top of that.’ So we show them what would happen if they were to select an HSA in place of that.”

The criteria and time needed to get on the plan will vary from state to state. By the end of 2007, NAW had made the plan available in about 20-25 states. Getting the criteria established with each state and each state’s insurance commission will require some fine tuning, Valiga says. Literally, every state is different.

“They are kings of their fiefdoms,” Valiga chuckles. “They rule with an iron hand.”

The NAW plan also includes various incentives for companies and its workers to get healthier, Valiga points out.

“All this wellness talk you hear is important,” he says. “In this plan, every new entry or renewal will be individually underwritten. And they all won’t get the same price. We focus on giving the bigger discounts to companies that are healthy. Everyone will get a [price] quote, but if you have a lot of smokers, you’ll pay more than another [company] would.”

It’s too early to gauge the degree of success that NAW’s plan will have. But Valiga is optimistic about what the plan can do for enrollees.

“Health insurance is the number one issue we hear about every day from member companies,” Valiga says. “We have a window to a great opportunity here: to meet a need for our member companies that has become increasingly a pressing one.”

For complete information on the plan, go to www.naw.flexiblebenefit.com