[The right problem]
I came home from the Health Equity conference in San Diego thinking about one thing: cost.
I'm an Actuary by training. I look at trend data for a living, and healthcare costs are still climbing faster than almost anything else our clients budget for. That's the problem I'm actually trying to solve. Benefits aren't a nice-to-have feature, they're the biggest lever we have against that trend. But plan design changes only work if they're built with real empathy for what the employee is being asked to do.
This year we've leaned hard into HealthEquity, our HSA partner, on exactly that. Educating employers on plan designs that lower cost. And educating employees on something harder: leaving a familiar copay plan for a high deductible account they now have to manage themselves. That's not just a plan change, it's a mindset change, and it's scary before it's ever empowering.
The best part of this week wasn't the HSA content, it was the room. Employers and carriers from markets all over the country share the same challenge with cost and, more important, with change. It reminded me of something I heard constantly in my prior role on the carrier side: healthcare is delivered locally. You can design a plan that's elegant on paper and portable across state lines, but the providers underneath it are regional, sometimes hyper local, and they require real market-specific attention instead of a national template stretched thin. As a PEO, our clients run coast to coast, and no two of them need the same answer.
We have a cost problem to solve, and this week handed us new tools and new people to solve it with. Looking forward to building on the partnerships we already have and starting new ones with the people I met this week.
Grateful to the HealthEquity team and everyone who spent time with us in San Diego talking through what good benefits strategy looks like on the ground. Laura Jean Henault Darla RosenfeldDarla Rosenfeld Gary RobinsonGary Robinson