(and why that belief is the real problem)
Most business owners don’t think much about health insurance. They tend to push it aside for most of the year. Not because it isn’t important, but because it isn’t the business.
I’m sure you didn’t start a company to manage deductibles, networks, and prescription pricing. You built something to solve a bigger problem. You hired people. You took responsibility for their livelihoods.
Health insurance is supposed to support that work quietly in the background.
Instead, once a year, it takes over.
A meeting appears on the calendar. A renewal proposal lands in your inbox. The numbers are higher than last year. The explanation is thin or nonexistent. The timeline is suddenly tight. And somehow, despite doing everything “right,” you’re being asked to accept another increase.
Most employers don’t agree with these outcomes. They accept them because they’ve been trained to believe they’re unavoidable.
The story employers are taught to accept
That belief didn’t come from nowhere.
For years, the market has repeated the same story: costs are up, claims are the claims, this is just how healthcare works. Those statements aren’t lies, but they’re incomplete. Over time, incomplete explanations condition people to stop asking better questions.
Why did this happen? What actually drove the increase? Could anything have been done earlier, before we got here?
When those questions go unanswered, renewal stops feeling like a decision. It starts to feel inevitable.
What’s actually running the system
The deeper issue is that employer health insurance doesn’t behave like a system anyone truly manages.
It’s a collection of parts. Carriers. Brokers. Administrators. Pharmacy managers. Networks. Providers. Each operates within its own silo, optimizing for its own incentives. Everyone touches the plan, but no single party owns the outcome the employer experiences.
When responsibility is fragmented, visibility disappears. And when visibility disappears, accountability follows. This isn’t an accident. It’s the system running exactly as designed.
And if this were truly inevitable, if outcomes were purely random, then why do similar employers experience wildly different results depending on how much visibility they have into their plan?
Employers still fund the entire system, but most only see the bill after the outcome has already been decided.
Why renting keeps the cycle alive
That’s why the renting analogy resonates so strongly with business owners.
Most fully insured plans behave like renting. You pay a fixed amount every year. Someone else controls the risk and the pricing. If the year goes well and utilization stays low, the upside doesn’t come back to you. It goes to the carrier. If the year runs hot, the increase still shows up at renewal, but this time, it’s worse.
Your only real lever is to switch carriers, which usually just resets the same cycle under a different logo, not without disrupting benefits and creating noise and confusion for your HR and employees.
That model feels foreign to owners because it doesn’t resemble how they run anything else. In every other part of the business, control matters. Predictability matters. Retained upside matters.
In fact, if any other costs went up every year without a clear “why”, it would trigger an internal investigation without questioning.
But in benefits, employers are taught to accept the opposite. They’re told ownership is for big companies, or that anything different is too risky or too complicated.
So they keep renting. And they keep absorbing increases they don’t fully understand.
Where inevitability really comes from
Renewal outcomes feel inevitable not because healthcare costs are random, but because of timing.
The decisions that drive cost happen throughout the year, while care is being used and prescriptions are being filled. But most employers don’t get meaningful visibility into those drivers while they’re happening.
By the time renewal arrives, the financial outcome is already set. Options narrow. Pressure replaces planning. Decisions that could have been addressed months earlier get compressed into a few weeks.
At that point, everyone is reacting.
That’s not a discipline problem on the employer’s part. It’s a system that reveals itself when it’s too late to change course.
The shift most employers never make
We’ve been working inside this industry since 1968. Across decades of renewals, carriers, and market cycles, one thing has remained consistent: when employers can see how their plan actually behaves, outcomes change.
If an employer is responsible for funding a benefit that affects their people and their bottom line, they deserve to understand how that benefit works.
Not after the fact. Not buried in carrier language. Not only when a renewal number shows up.
Transparency isn’t about being loud or disruptive. It’s about responsibility. When employers can see the system, they can influence it.
That doesn’t mean healthcare suddenly becomes cheap. Anyone who promises that is oversimplifying something complex. What visibility creates isn’t miracles. It’s control.
When employers can see what’s happening, they ask better questions and make decisions earlier. Waste becomes visible. Surprises become less frequent.
And that matters because increases don’t just hurt once. A 15% increase doesn’t feel catastrophic in a single year. Over four years, it quietly turns into nearly double the spend.
This isn’t about being cheaper. It’s about running benefits like an owner instead of a renter.
Before switching plans, understand the one you’re already in
The goal isn’t to rush into a different plan. The goal is to understand the one you’re already in.
Knowing how premiums are allocated, where risk accumulates, and when decisions actually matter changes the entire dynamic. Clarity creates leverage long before choices are forced.
Most employers eventually stop asking whether they can get a cheaper plan. They start asking why this keeps happening in the first place.
That question is usually where things finally start to change.
If you’re curious what this looks like in your own plan, we built a short assessment designed to answer one simple question: Is the “Safe” Health Plan Actually the Riskiest One?
It looks at structure, timing, and where pressure tends to build long before numbers show up.
Most people use it simply to get context. To confirm whether what they’re experiencing is “just the market,” or whether the system is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
If renewal has started to feel inevitable, this is a reasonable place to interrupt that pattern.
You can take the assessment here.
And I promise, once you see it, you’ll never look at the annual renewal the same way again.
See you next time.
Guil D’Emidio
Marketing Director at Taylor Insurance Services