One does wonder how this will all pan out. Insurance companies today are certainly not short on subsidiary companies and they are buying them up like crazy. Not too long ago Wellpoint bought CareMore in California, the Medicare D Senior HMO provider.
WellPoint Buys CareMore–Senior HMO Based in California–Presently Owned By Private Equity Firms
This is interesting that WellPoint and their partners bought 78% of the company interest right from their own venture capital company. Sandbox was created back in November of 2008.
BlueCross BlueShield Create New Venture Capital Organization
One of the products that 
Sandbox has funded which are around in doctor’s lobbies all over are the orange Phreesia tablets to allow patients to fill in their information which works with adding the basic demographics to a medical record system or can be printed out.
Blue Cross Venture Capital Investment in Phreesia Tablets Appears to be Paying Off
The Bloom exchange is primarily targeted at employers and has plans to where a base cost is covered by the company and the rest falls back to the employee. Well who knows if the state exchanges will ever get started. One state, Kansas has refused federal funds to create theirs so who knows. The public option of course is still the missing puzzle piece in all of this and so much of Health IT services are becoming “insurance company owned”. BD
WellPoint Inc. (WLP), the largest insurer by enrollment, is buying a private health-insurance exchange to compete for employers with the U.S. state-run marketplaces set to open in 2014 under President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul.
WellPoint and two nonprofit health insurers purchased a 78 percent stake today in Bloom Health, a closely held benefits company in Minneapolis, for an undisclosed sum, WellPoint said. Bloom is a two-year-old online marketplace that offers a menu of health plans to about 20,000 workers at almost 50 companies.
Using a private exchange such as Bloom would limit an employer’s costs and provide consistency compared with separate state-run exchanges, each with their own regulations, said Ken Goulet, chief executive officer of Indianapolis-based WellPoint’s commercial business unit.
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