Most employers spend millions on healthcare without realizing how much control they actually have.
Own Your Benefits is for forward-thinking leadership teams who want to take ownership of their healthcare and benefits strategy.
Through conversations with industry leaders, healthcare experts, and employers, you’ll learn how to lower costs, improve employee health, and turn your healthcare program into a competitive advantage.
Hosted by Brandon Ernstes and Steve Gingrich.
What to Do When Your Self-Funded Plan Has A Bad Year
A 140% loss ratio looks like a disaster. If you’re looking at that in your first year self-funded, the obvious conclusion is that you made a mistake.
In this episode of Own Your Benefits, we walk through what we’d actually tell an employer sitting in that position.
The short version is that 140% isn’t one number, it’s two, and they behave completely differently. If the claims are landing under your specific deductible, your stop-loss carrier hasn’t paid much, and that side of your renewal may come back in single digits. The increase lands on your aggregate claims budget instead, which isn’t a fixed cost at all. Those are dollars going out to pay your employees’ claims, and you can still do something about them.
We put the same year against a fully insured plan for comparison. At that loss ratio, fully insured, you’d be looking down the barrel of a renewal that nearly doubles your premium, with no lever to pull. Self-funded, roughly 30% of your spend takes a small increase, admin stays close to flat, and the 60% that moves is a budget rather than a bill.
If you’re halfway through a hard year, ask your consultant for your renewal projection now. Not a market trend number applied to everybody, but a projection built off your own claims and what’s actually happening in your plan. You shouldn’t be seeing that for the first time when the renewal is released.
Chapters:
00:00:00 - What a Bad Year Actually Looks Like
00:03:31 - Aggregate Claims Are Rising, and Why
00:07:01 - Why 140% Isn’t the Number That Matters
00:10:00 - What the Same Year Would Cost You Fully Insured
00:12:37 - How Underwriters Reward Employers Who Do the Work
14 Oct 2026
You're Paying More Than Your Claims Are Worth
Most employers treat a medical bill as a number they owe. It arrives, it gets paid, and the only question anyone asks afterward is what it does to the renewal. The leadership teams getting different results ask something else first: is this amount even correct?
In this episode of Own Your Benefits, Steve Gingrich and Brandon Ernstes lay out the two levers that actually move healthcare spend. Pay less for the claims you're already getting, and prevent the high cost ones from reaching the severity they otherwise would. Everything else is a version of those two. Brandon's framing is that neither one is available to a company that's only buying insurance. If nobody is looking at the plan during the year, nobody is finding anything.
On paying less, the examples are concrete. Brandon describes a member driving over an hour each way for a recurring infusion. Moving that site of care into the member's home saved four hours a week and reduced the plan's cost on that drug by roughly 40%. Steve walks through a claim where an IV bag, the tube, and the needle were each billed separately, and an air ambulance charge that came back around 50% below what was first presented. None of that fell on the member, and none of it changed the care anyone received.
On prevention, they make the case that the highest impact move an employer has is getting every employee and spouse in front of a doctor with blood drawn. They say roughly 40% of plan members do it today and they aim for 90%. They also get into GLP-1s, and why telling your PBM you don't cover them for weight loss accomplishes very little if there's no rigorous prior authorization process behind it.
Chapters:
00:00:00 - The Two Ways to Pay Less for Healthcare
00:03:34 - Same Care, Same Drugs, Different Price
00:06:37 - What a High Performing TPA Actually Catches
00:10:17 - Why Prevention Starts With a Blood Draw
00:14:30 - GLP-1s: Why "Not for Weight Loss" Isn't Enough
00:17:58 - Access, and the Provider Who Knows Your Name
30 Sept 2026
If We Ran Your Health Plan, Here's What We'd Do
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
16 Sept 2026
The Renewal Work You Need to Do Before October
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
2 Sept 2026
The Cheapest Healthcare Strategy Is Having A Great Culture
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
19 Aug 2026
Why Every Employer Needs to Care About Stop-Loss In 2026
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
5 Aug 2026
Stop Treating Healthcare Like a Fixed Cost | Own Your Benefits
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
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