The Hartford Courant Dan Haar column

July 26--Craig Weber grew up amid explosive growth and glamour beyond imagination in southern California, immediately after World War II.

His family was very much a part of the excitement as the victorious nation looked west for new ideas, a new power base.

But for Weber, the glory wasn't in Hollywood. It was 3,000 miles away in Hartford, Connecticut -- the insurance capital. He was the son of one of Connecticut General's top-producing agents.

Life under the old system, for the Webers of Glendale, was anything but staid. Gerald F. Weber wasn't just selling life insurance for Connecticut General, he was redefining financial planning, especially for doctors, as he helped clear the way for partnerships.

It was a fast-changing world, and companies like Connecticut General, founded in 1865, came up with financial products to make it go. For the time being, customers paid for all this service through premiums on their life insurance -- but like everything else in mid-century America, that would soon give way to something else.

"My dad became one of the biggest producers in the United States based on Connecticut General's training," Weber said. "He was behind the law that allowed doctors to incorporate."

Weber followed his father's path and became a Connecticut General agent in 1972, with success. A decade later, the old company joined with INA, the Insurance Company of North America -- to form Cigna.

And Weber's world was never the same.

"I got out," said Weber, now 71, still living in California. "I realized that whatever they had was gone. ... I got out just as it started to deteriorate."

Within a few years, Cigna -- with its headquarters in INA's Philadelphia -- had dismantled the old exclusive-agent system. By 2000, it sold its life insurance, annuity, property-casualty and other businesses, focusing on managed health care.

Weber has not been keeping close watch on the latest wave of changes, including Cigna's $54 billion merger with Anthem that the companies announced Friday. To him, the business that mattered was not Cigna but Connecticut General, which he recalls as an innovative force in insurance.

As the business once known as Connecticut General remakes itself once again, this time as part of Anthem, Weber's view of things tells us a lot.

These companies were not built into deca-billion-dollar behemoths on the strength of Wall Street engineering. And today's hard-charging bosses, smart and slick as they appear, are hardly the main force behind creating values we can't even comprehend.

No, Cigna, Anthem, Aetna and the rest were built up by long forgotten people like Gerald Weber, who started on 100 percent commission, calling all the Webers in his local phone book.

And as Craig Weber learned, no matter how good a system seems, it won't last.

As it happened, the Brooklyn Dodgers played their last game in New York the same year Connecticut General pulled up stakes from the edge of Hartford's Bushnell Park, out to the radical, glass-and-steel, modernist Bloomfield campus that rocked corporate culture.

Weber made a pilgrimage and loved the buildings: "They were beautiful, all squared off."

Weber remembers the people, including Henry Roberts, the longtime president of Connecticut General, before the INA deal. As an up-and-coming member of a die-hard company family, he got to meet with Roberts -- who was born in 1916, same year as Weber's father.

"He supported us and made sure the money was there to make it happen," Weber recalls. "Their whole idea was to offer full service to the client, God being first and the client being second. ... That was his personal philosophy. Now it's not politically correct to say that, but that's how he used to operate."

Change was happening, but at least, as Weber remembers it, the old, exclusive agency system was still in place. For the agents in Los Angeles, where breathless economic growth was part of the smoggy air, the system worked great under a fellow named Walter Gastil.

"They were hired by one of the most magnificent guys in the industry, became one of the most cutting edge agencies in the world," Weber said.

The agency system was expensive, but policyholders were willing to pay for it, until that, too, changed -- with "consumerism," a word Weber utters the same way Sen. Joe McCarthy said "communism" in the early 1950s.

"People want something for nothing," Weber said. "I've been in this business forever and it's ridiculous."

Cigna recognized the consumer revolution early on, pushing toward lower prices to the detriment of the old system. "It was really sad. The very beginning of financial planning was destroyed," he said. "It destroyed the company."

He's wrong on that one. Consumerism didn't destroy the company, it only changed it.

Same with specialization, as the old multi-line insurers staked out their focused roles. Same with streamlining, as automation did in tens of thousands of employees. Same with what we might call corporatism, as the newly streamlined, focused companies stopped talking about employees and sought sheer growth through acquisitions.

And now, all those trends have come together in a storm that apparently will leave just three national health insurers standing -- each one claiming the mantle of innovation and efficiency.

It's a world that's hard to predict, even for people who are masters of it -- among them John F. O'Connell Jr., president of C.M. Smith Agency Inc., a health management brokerage in downtown Hartford with large corporate clients.

"The fuse that was lit by the Affordable Care Act on March 22, 2010, continues to go off," O'Connell said, referring to the current wave of consolidation across health care.

Weber, semi-retired, sees an irony. Consumerism led to a breakdown that brought less competition and more government control, which is hurting consumers. He can't stand Obamacare because it takes away choice.

"One of the things I've learned is that there's no such thing as stability," he said.

On that last point, he is totally correct.

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