The Timelessness of Diversity
In 1898, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company
launched Sunset magazine at train
stations and aboard “The Sunset Limited”, which ran between New Orleans and San
Francisco. The magazine was an unabashed effort to combat fearsome "Wild
West" labels about California. It aimed to attract not only tourists onto
the company’s trains and to the railroad’s resort (the Hotel Del Monte in
Monterey), but also to encourage young invincibles as well as newly arriving
immigrants to stay and buy land, since the Southern Pacific was the largest
single landowner in California and Nevada.
The magazine painted an image of the future of
California, of what it could become, and it gave its readers varied meaningful
pathways to engage. In short, it brilliantly promoted a colorfully diverse
blueprint of the future.
It is estimated that more than one-million
California consumers will enroll in subsidized and non-subsidized health plans
through the exchange created by the new health care law, and hundreds of
thousands more will enroll in non-exchange health plans by the time the current
open enrollment period ends on March 31, 2014.
However, enrollments have been inadequate among
groups where linguistic differences and cultural awareness present challenges. For example, while more than half of Caucasian
adults reported confidence in understanding key health insurance terms, only 21
percent of Hispanic adults said the same. The gap narrows but persists, even
after controlling for such factors as income and education level.
Given that the hard work of CAHU member and
non-member agents accounts for nearly 80% of all of California’s enrollments, it is
clear that CAHU has before it a historic opportunity to give voice to its
vision of a blueprint of how to reach emerging communities.
In this spirit, CAHU informed members last week
that it was forming a Diversity Task Force to be chaired by Michael Lujan,
Silicon Valley AHU member. Michael Lujan and the new Task Force are being asked
to identify and develop a multi-cultural agent diversity plan for outreach,
education, enrollment, visibility building, and media engagement. Within the
next several weeks, members can expect to see a new link on our CAHU website
for the Diversity Committee. All CAHU members are welcome to participate.
Some of the immediate objectives of the
committee are to work with community based partners throughout California to help
prepare for the 2015 open enrollment which begins later this fall. Informed by
the results of the 2014 open enrollment, the Committee will help create
effective outreach and enrollment strategies that include geographic mapping,
targeted events, and the deployment of qualified insurance agents to help
enroll these targeted communities.
For more than one hundred years, Sunset magazine celebrated the new
West, but in the 1990’s it lost touch with its changing demographic. Luckily
the magazine adapted, and today breathes new inspiration to an even more
culturally diverse audience. CAHU intends
to do the same.
Until Next
Week,
Sam