Own Your Benefits

Very few people get hired at a company to run a health plan. It lands on a CFO's desk because it's the second or third largest line on the P&L and somebody has to own it, usually with no background and no obvious first step.

In this episode of Own Your Benefits, Steve Gingrich and Brandon Ernstes take the seat instead of advising it. The setup is a 250 person company, fully insured, just starting to look at self-funding. What would they actually do, and in what order?

Steve starts with awareness, because it's hard to get pitched a shiny new program when you already know exactly where you stand. That means benchmarking per employee per year spend nationally and against peers of similar size, industry, and geography. It also means asking how the carrier and the broker get paid, whether contingencies exist, and whether anyone's incentives are pointed the same direction as yours.

Brandon starts with the leadership team. What's the culture, how engaged are the mid-level managers, how would a sharp change be received, and what does the demographic makeup look like. Higher tenure and lower turnover push you toward investing in a plan rather than buying insurance. Then the mechanics: what a captive actually is underneath the buzzword, how to vet a TPA, a PBM, a network, and a concierge, and why reference based pricing lives or dies on how easy the plan is to use. Anyone can adopt it and save money. Doing it without fixing access buys you frustration you'll pay for later.

Chapters:


00:00:00 - If We Were Running Your Health Plan


00:01:11 - Step One: Know Exactly Where You Stand


00:03:48 - Buying Insurance or Running a Plan?


00:06:28 - Captives, TPAs, PBMs, and What to Vet

00:10:56 - Why Access Decides Whether RBP Works


00:15:38 - Prevention and the 90% Exam Benchmark

It's September. Your renewal lands in about 60 days, and by the time it does, most of what determines the number will already have happened.

In this episode of Own Your Benefits, Steve Gingrich and Brandon Ernstes walk through what a leadership team can still do in the weeks before a carrier releases a renewal. Brandon's framing is that the pressure cooker isn't the employer's fault. Carriers built the timeline, releasing a number 60 days out and handing you a clock. But the work that moves that number doesn't happen inside those 60 days, and waiting until October means reacting instead of deciding.

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Why Your Renewal Is Already in Motion
00:03:24 - Getting Claims Data When You're Fully Insured
00:08:10 - Why October and November Are Too Late

Every employer looking to spend less on healthcare starts in the same place: plan design, network, contracts, vendors. All of that matters. But the leadership teams getting the best results tend to have something that costs nothing to buy and can't be bought at all.

In this episode of Own Your Benefits, Steve Gingrich and Brandon Ernstes make the case that culture is the multiplier underneath every high-performing healthcare program.

Brandon bet that around 90% of companies running a high-performing program also have a genuinely good culture. The logic is simple enough. Engagement is what makes a strategy work, and you can't get engagement out of a workforce that only thinks in terms of what's in it for me.

Steve is blunt about where that starts. He says he's a selfish person by nature and has to work at it daily. They get into what that looks like inside an ESOP, why they hire for culture before skills, what an 8,000 employee company did when it realized it had clinics, pharmacies, and more data than it knew what to do with, and why neither the carrot nor the stick gets you where you want to go.

In this episode:
0:00 - Nobody Is Unselfish by Default
5:16 - Your Job Is Not Your Purpose
10:40 - Culture First, Skills Second: Hiring Inside an ESOP
18:55 - The Ace Hardware Referral That Traveled D.C. to Montana
25:19 - Why Nothing in Healthcare Is One Size Fits All
30:38 - The ATV Test: Will Your Contract Actually Pay?
36:47 - The Knowledge Gap AI Is About to Create
42:21 - Carrots, Sticks, and Data Nobody Knows What to Do With
47:44 - Clinical Wellbeing and the Two Ways to Pay Less for Claims

Employers often treat stop-loss insurance as a passive safety net. But with $2 million healthcare claims spiking by 213% since 2020, relying on a traditional deductible without a strategy is a guaranteed way to blow up your next renewal.In this episode of Own Your Benefits, Steve Gingrich and Brandon Ernstes break down exactly what employers need to know about the 2026 stop-loss market. We uncover the hidden conflicts of interest ruining healthcare captives and explain how high-performing, ownership-minded leadership teams are actively fighting back.We skip the theory and dive into three real-world case studies showing exactly how employers are legally neutralizing massive claims mid-year—protecting their employees and their bottom line at the same time.In this episode:

0:00 - Intro & The 2026 Stop-Loss Crisis ($2M Claims Up 213%)

3:18 - Stop-Loss 101: Specific vs. Aggregate Deductibles Explained

8:10 - Cost Containment: Voluntary vs. Required Plan Engagement

11:13 - The Truth About Captives, Consortiums, and Stand-Alone Stop-Loss

13:28 - Red Flag: The Captive Manager Conflict of Interest

28:10 - Case Study 1: Neutralizing an $850k Laser for Childhood Cancer

34:47 - Case Study 2: Saving 30-40% by Redirecting Cancer Infusions

37:51 - Case Study 3: Shifting a $600k Renal Claim to Medicare

Employers are spending millions a year on healthcare — and most have no idea how much control they actually have over it.Welcome to Own Your Benefits, the podcast for leadership teams who are done accepting double-digit renewals as the cost of doing business.

Hosts Steve Gingrich and Brandon Ernstes break down the practical strategies employers across the country are using to improve employee health and lower long-term healthcare costs at the same time.

Each episode brings in industry experts, healthcare leaders, and the employers actually implementing this work — no theory, no jargon.Every employer is in the healthcare business, whether they like it or not.In this trailer:- Why healthcare belongs on the P&L like every other major expense- What separates leadership teams that control costs from those that don't- How the right long-term strategy improves employee health and the bottom line- Why this show is for employees, not just executives