Separating The Sheep From The Goats – Matthew 25:31–46
I have hated this business for a long time but I love being an outlaw helping companies escape the prevailing death spiral…………………………..
Source of All Evil – Woke HR Departments
By Joe (Jody) Bright
I have been involved in health insurance for 30+ years and have observed a growing trend. It is deadly.
I have been a consultant for the majority of my career assisting companies with alternative ways to manage and to fund their medical plans. These are self funded plans, administered by third parties (TPAs) and outside the major carrier (BUCA) world. The attraction to this type of plan is driven by money, the financial interests of the company.
I have never “sold” one to an HR manager or HR director but always to CFOs, comptrollers, risk managers, CEOs, or the owner himself, the money guy.
It is a program that allows these decision-makers to employ strategies not available through the BUCAs and to pay for what they want to pay for, and not for what they don’t, and potentially cutting costs as much as by half or more. We have literally “made companies profitable” at times facilitating a corporate sale, by significantly changing their bottom line with these savings. The point? There are no entitlement mentalities driving these decisions in these few HR departments, sound economics prevails.
But the battle has grown interesting.
The “woke” culture that increasingly prevails has truly “separated the sheep from the goats”. Those employers still driven by sound financial principles have come to the forefront. We have written more business recently, in these two years, more easily, as the concepts seem to crystalize in their view separating the sound from the obviously untenable economics of the entitlement-driven programs of those major carriers and their HR prey. That world is becoming economically untenable.
And, interestingly, the black hole, as I call it, of this industry, is the pharmaceutical industry component. There is so incredibly much money changing hands behind the scenes between pharma manufacturers, pharmacy benefit managers, these large carriers, and even brokerage houses that it has largely augmented, shifted profit lines. They all have their hands in the till promoting high, high dollar drug costs. When I was young in the business a 9% pharmacy spend was high. Nowadays we frequently see 50% or more. This is a result of a lot of corruption.
We address these things with hard solutions.
Not only are woke HR departments destroying and driving good, productive people from the corporate world and creating their own version of “Atlas Shrugged” but these companies are destroying themselves financially in the process. And good on them. The only reason they survive so far is by virtue of the common woke-ism culture of such corporations feeding each other, interlaced with government subsidy and interventionism. But ultimately they will fail.
This part of the corporate world is heading for a bust. Some just may prevail if they hold onto sound economic principles.
It’s going to get more interesting.
In the meantime, my focus is to find more of these companies who want out of the box, companies who are digging in and rejecting this destructive culture and are prepping for economic survival.
I have hated this business for a long time but I love being an outlaw helping companies escape the prevailing death spiral that is fed by this entitlement culture. It is playing into the hands of greater and greater government intervention.
This may be a boring component to the masses but it is having a great impact financially on our entire economy. This thing is going to break up. But we fight on.
