Is Your Drug Coverage “Good Enough” for Medicare? What Employers Need to Know About Creditable Coverage and 2027 Pre-Tax Limits
Every fall, tucked in with open enrollment materials, a short notice goes out to employees that most people skim right past. It’s the Medicare Part D creditable coverage notice, and for years it has been one of the more routine pieces of the benefits calendar. For plan years beginning in 2027, the way plans are […]
The Benefit Everyone Offers and Almost Nobody Uses
Nearly every mid-market benefits program includes them. An employee assistance program with counseling sessions available at no cost. A digital wellness platform with health coaching, condition management, and lifestyle programming. A telehealth option that connects to a licensed provider in minutes. Biometric screening. Disease management outreach. Diabetes and hypertension support. On paper, it’s an impressive […]
Wellness Theater: Why Your Step Challenge Isn’t Building the Healthy, Loyal Workforce You’re Paying For
Walk into almost any mid-market organization and you’ll find some version of it: a wellness program. Maybe it’s a step-challenge app with a leaderboard. Maybe it’s a biometric screening event every fall, a flu-shot clinic, a gym-membership discount, or a wellness portal with a points system that unlocks a gift card. On paper, the box […]
What Public Entity Leaders Should Understand About How Their Risk Pools Actually Work
If you manage a municipality, county, school district, special district, or tribal government, there’s a good chance your organization’s insurance and benefits programs were in place long before you arrived. Someone — maybe a predecessor, maybe a board decision from a decade ago, maybe a regional tradition that everyone simply followed — chose the risk […]
The Boutique Advantage: When Fortune 500 Expertise Meets the Advisor Who Answers the Phone
There’s a decision that plays out every open enrollment season in break rooms, kitchen tables, and hurried lunch-hour browser sessions across the country. An employee opens the enrollment portal, scans the plan options, and does what most people do: picks the one with the lowest premium. It feels responsible. It feels financially disciplined. And in […]
What Would Happen to Your Family If You Couldn’t Work Tomorrow?
Nobody wakes up planning to have a stroke at 44. Nobody schedules the car accident that happens on the way home from their kid’s soccer game. Nobody pencils in the back injury that turns a Tuesday afternoon into six months of lost income. These things happen to other people — until they happen to you. […]
What Happens When Your Key Person Disappears: Business Continuity Planning Beyond the Org Chart
Every organization has them — the people who hold it together. Not always the ones with the biggest titles, though often they’re in leadership. These are the individuals whose relationships, institutional knowledge, decision-making authority, and operational involvement are so deeply embedded in the business that their sudden absence would create a crisis that no org […]
Level-Funded Plans and the Data Advantage: The Middle Market’s Best-Kept Secret in Health Plan Strategy
There’s a conversation happening in mid-market benefits strategy that most employers have never been invited into. While Fortune 500 companies have operated self-funded health plans for decades — leveraging claims data, controlling plan design, and retaining favorable experience — mid-market employers have largely been told the same thing by their brokers and carriers: you’re not […]
Total Cost of Risk: Why the Smartest Employers Stopped Comparing Premiums
Every year, somewhere between August and November, the same scene plays out in boardrooms across the middle market. The broker walks in with a renewal presentation — a stack of slides showing this year’s premium versus last year’s premium, a few carrier options ranked by price, and maybe a bar chart comparing medical trend to […]
The First 90 Days After You Change Brokers: What Implementation Actually Looks Like
Every employer who’s ever considered changing brokers has had the same conversation behind closed doors. The current relationship isn’t working — the service has gone stale, the strategy feels recycled, the team keeps turning over, the renewal was lazy. A better option is sitting right there in the RFP responses. But then someone says it: […]