Eating lunch while interviewing a noted visionary is difficult. Doing it while interviewing two is impossible.

Doing it when they're both in the health insurance business talking about the power of self-management and you're trying to eat the Merrion Hotel's fried game chips and club sandwich slathered with mayonnaise was just silly to even attempt.

Lord doesn't want my chips. Actually he didn't even ask me if I was going to eat them. He did say that whether I consume them, and how many (and the same with pints later on) were the type of minute-to-minute choices with impacts on health he wants consumers to think about.

Asking those questions makes them healthier and, in the long run, of course, that's good news for his company's bottom line.

Understanding what makes consumers tick . . . Lord is careful to make the distinction between consumers and patients . . . is key to Humana's approach.

It went so far as to hire ethnographic researchers to live with 36 families for a month to observe their behaviour.

One finding was a distinction between how men and women approach their health. Women tend to find the support of a group, whether in a WeightWatchers type setting or through a social networking website, helpful.

Men tend to avoid discussing health with other men. But give a guy a gadget . . . Lord produces a pedometer from his pocket . . . and offer him free stuff as an incentive, and you get results.

"The effect is transformative, " Lord says, grinning.

The pedometer he holds bears the familiar Virgin logo. "We're sort of the 'Intel Inside' on Virgin insurance, " he says.

Customers connect the pedometer to a computer each day, and a tally of their activity is clocked up like frequent flyer miles. Rewards include free cinema tickets or discounts on Virgin Atlantic.

The idea of health as a business is anathema to some in Ireland, though it counts as a significant percentage of economic activity. It's something that Lord's host, OliverTattan, chief executive of health insurer Vivas, is used to contending with. Tattan says that Vivas and Humana are beginning a strategic partnership to "see how we might work together", to begin with sharing ideas and best practice. They were set up on a sort of corporate blind date by their common reinsurer Munich Re. The pair have been meeting civil servants and politicians to discuss the healthcare market.

Tattan wonders whether the Irish government is serious about bringing competition to a market dominated by VHI, which is not required to play by the same rules as other insurers, including the requirement to maintain reserves of 50%.

Combined with risk equalisation (by which everyone pays the same premium regardless of age, gender or health profile), which may yet push Bupa out of the market, Tattan asks, "do they want us here?"

That companies are unsure may help explain why insurers like Hibernian, Axa and Allianz . . . active in other parts of the insurance market here . . . have chosen, so far, to avoid the health sector.

The very presence of Lord, representing one of the largest US insurers, suggests that there may be more health insurance choices for Irish consumers down the line . . . if the regulatory climate is right. If the market is, as Lord puts it, "transparent".