Ep #314: Removing Self-Funding Barriers For Employers and Advisors

This episode of The ShiftShapers Podcast is called "Removing Self-Funding Barriers For Employers and Advisors" with Michael Poelman and Spencer Brydon, President and Regional Vice President of Sales respectively at Novo Benefits.Today, Michael and Spencer discuss what keeps employers and brokers from going self-funded, as well as what independence and transparency really mean in this space. They also share how brokers can approach stop-loss carriers and reduce complexity moving forward.What You’ll Learn From this Episode:01:46 Barriers to becoming self-funded: Perceived risk & complexity05:49 True independence & transparency10:26 Pros & cons of different avenues to a self-funded plan12:27 Talking to a stop-loss carrier & reducing complexity18:01 The present & future roles of technologyQuotes:03:14 “Jumping into the TPA realm or vertically and they go to TPA, they tend to see those complexities are worked out because they’ve already prefabbed whatever they’re getting.”13:48 “A traditional broker might just go out there and market stop-loss but they’re not really again able to get the stop-loss markets to respond with rate discounts that are appropriate for what you’ve put together.”17:52 “They oftentimes come to us with 1 solution and when they realize that the other solutions might have more to offer, they oftentimes trade up in the sense.”18:58 “As we start to introduce AI and machine learning into the process, we’re making it much easier to be able to create customized plan stacks that are targeted at a specific population.”20:19 “If you’re building a plan just based off of a census, you don’t have very much insight, if any at all, into what’s actually going on behind the scenes.”