An up-and-coming health benefits firm will relocate to downtown Chicago from smaller offices in Oak Brook to accommodate the company’s growth and future employment needs.
Destiny Health, which sells so-called consumer-directed health plans, has signed a letter of intent to move into the 29,000-square-foot 21st floor of 200 W. Monroe St., a building co-owned by John Buck Co. investment fund. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed.
Destiny Chief Executive Scott Spiker said the company wanted to move downtown to be closer to more current and potential client offices, the Chicago insurance broker community and the company’s desired future job base. He also sees downtown Chicago as a home to more entrepreneurial businesses while being convenient for employees and clients.
“As we have grown, we have found we need the high intellectual kinds of employees to support this kind of job growth,” Spiker said. “Being in Oak Brook, every employee gets here by car.”
Destiny’s primary market is to sell its consumer-directed health plans to companies with between 2 and 500 workers. Such plans let employees or the company decide how much they want to spend on medical care.
The plan or employer then sets aside a defined amount of money to put toward medical costs. The money is put into a fund to pay for doctor visits and deductibles or co-payments for drugs, with unused dollars rolled over into the next year.
Since the company’s launch four years ago Destiny’s staff size has soared from five workers to more than 150. The company will be expanding its employment in a number of areas including underwriting, marketing and actuarial services.
Destiny’s revenue jumped 116 percent last year to about $200 million while the number of health plan enrollees rose 81 percent to 55,000. Destiny made its first profit in the first quarter of this year.
“We expect to start next year at 100,000 members,” Spiker said.
The company operates in Illinois, Wisconsin, Maryland, Massachusetts, Virginia and Washington, D.C.
While its rapid growth is impressive, industry analysts believe the company will eventually be gobbled up by a larger health insurance conglomerate, given the need for health plans to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of subscribers in order to spread their costs and turn a profit.
Last year, for example, Minneapolis-based managed-care giant UnitedHealth Group paid $300 million in cash for Definity Health Corp., which sells consumer-directed health plans.
But Spiker said there are no plans to be part of a merger, adding that Destiny’s South Africa- based parent company, Discovery International, is well-funded. “We are thriving on our own and we have good capital support,” Spiker said.
Des Plaines hospital conversion: Resurrection Health Care said it plans to convert Holy Family Medical Center in Des Plaines into a long-term acute-care hospital for critically ill patients.
The new facility would focus on caring for patients who are “more acutely ill and require more intensive care nursing,” spokesman Brian Crawford said.
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