Ethos Benefits

Ethos Benefits Fiduciary + Employee Benefits

There are two ways to run your employee benefits strategy. One looks like a scramble every renewal season. The other loo...
09/02/2026

There are two ways to run your employee benefits strategy. One looks like a scramble every renewal season. The other looks like a plan.

The old broker game runs on opaque commissions, renewal negotiation as the only strategy, and a broker who disappears until next year's fire drill. It treats "this is just how healthcare works" as an acceptable answer.

The Ethos way runs on disclosed compensation, year-round strategic planning, and a fiduciary standard that puts your interests first, always. Discovery, analysis, alignment, and a real partnership in between renewals, not just around them.

If your current setup looks more like the left column than the right one, that's worth a conversation.

Three lawsuits, two dismissals, one that's still standing.Since 2024, employees have sued Johnson & Johnson, Wells Fargo...
08/31/2026

Three lawsuits, two dismissals, one that's still standing.

Since 2024, employees have sued Johnson & Johnson, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase, alleging their employers failed to prudently manage prescription drug costs. Most of these cases were dismissed on a technicality, not because the employers did nothing wrong, but because the plaintiffs couldn't clear a procedural bar called standing.

That bar isn't guaranteed to hold forever. ERISA fiduciary duty for a health plan isn't new law, and it requires prudent oversight of PBM and carrier contracts whether or not a claims data bill ever passes.

08/27/2026

"These high-dollar claimants were numbers on my renewals and spreadsheets."

Brett Morris said that about himself. He spent 15 years as a benefits advisor before founding the Samaritan Fund Program, and he is describing the exact moment he stopped being proud of how he worked.

You have sat in this meeting. Somebody pulls up the claims report and points at the top of the list. A number with a diagnosis code attached. Renal. Oncology. Transplant. The room starts problem-solving around that number: laser it, raise the deductible, market the plan, move the stop loss.

Nobody in that room says the person's name.

Here is what Brett realized. That number is a human being who got the worst phone call of their life a few months ago, and who is now quietly panicking about how to pay for it. They are on your plan. They are on your payroll. And your renewal strategy and their survival are the same conversation, whether or not anyone in the room says so out loud.

That is not a soft observation. It is a strategic one.

When you treat your highest claimant purely as a cost center, your only levers are blunt: shift cost to everyone, shrink the plan, or shop the risk to another carrier who will price it right back at you. When you treat that claimant as a person with a problem worth solving, other doors open. Charitable funding. Alternative coverage. Site of care. Drug sourcing. Real strategy instead of a shell game.

If you are a CFO or a benefits leader, here is a question worth asking at your next renewal: we know what our top five claimants cost us. Do we know anything about what they are going through, and has anyone actually tried to help them?

Most plans cannot answer that. The ones that can tend to spend less.

Watch Brett Morris explain the moment that changed how he approaches high-cost claims.

08/25/2026

Choose your hard.

That's the phrase Stephanie Porrino, an HR leader who moved her company off a traditional fully insured plan, uses for the moment employers get stuck.

On The Business of Benefits, she framed the real decision employers face every renewal season: is it harder to stand in front of your employees and explain another increase and a worse plan, or is it harder to learn something new, take on a plan that requires more active management, and actually change the outcome?

Her point isn't that the alternative path is easy. It's that "easy" was never actually on the table. The traditional path just hides its cost somewhere else: denied claims, call queues, and a plan that gets a little worse every single year. She contrasts this with employees on more actively managed plans, who get real advocacy instead of a 1-800 number and a call queue where good luck means talking to the same person twice.

Both paths take work. Only one of them gets easier over time.

For CFOs and CHROs heading into another renewal cycle, this reframe is worth bringing into the room: staying the same isn't the safe, easy choice it feels like. It's just a different kind of hard, and one that compounds.

Watch Stephanie's full breakdown on The Business of Benefits. Full episode linked below.

Rachel Strauss asks a question most employers have never thought to raise.Pharmacy rebates get treated by many employers...
08/25/2026

Rachel Strauss asks a question most employers have never thought to raise.

Pharmacy rebates get treated by many employers as free money, a nice check that shows up because the PBM negotiated well on their behalf. Rachel's point complicates that picture. Rebates flow through a chain of intermediaries, GPOs, aggregators, and holding companies, many of which are connected to the very same PBMs and insurance carriers an employer already contracts with. Who controls that chain, and how much of the rebate actually reaches the employer, is rarely disclosed clearly.

Her advice is a simple diagnostic: ask directly how your rebates are aggregated, and by whom. If a PBM requires the use of its own in-house aggregator and can't explain that arrangement clearly, that's a signal worth taking seriously.

For CFOs and CHROs responsible for pharmacy spend, this isn't a technical detail to leave to a broker. It's a direct financial question with a direct financial answer, and one your organization has a right to see clearly.

Have you ever actually asked this question of your current PBM? If not, what's stopping you?

"We are no longer a cost center. We are helping to become a profit center for the company."That's how Stephanie Porrino,...
08/20/2026

"We are no longer a cost center. We are helping to become a profit center for the company."

That's how Stephanie Porrino, founder and CEO of Empower Healthcare Insights, describes the shift that happens when an HR and benefits function stops being purely reactive.

For most companies, benefits gets treated as a fixed, unavoidable expense: something to manage, minimize, and explain away at renewal time. Stephanie's experience points to a different outcome. When benefits strategy is handled with the same rigor as any other business decision, real cost control, real plan design choices, real data, it stops draining the budget and starts protecting it.

That distinction matters most to the people who own the budget. A cost center is judged on how little damage it does. A profit center is judged on the value it creates. The same benefits function can sit in either category, depending on how it's managed.

For CFOs specifically, this reframes an internal conversation that often never happens: is your benefits program treated as a line item to minimize, or as a lever your company can actually pull to protect margin and retain talent?

Companies that get this right aren't doing anything mysterious. They're simply applying the same standards to healthcare spend that they apply everywhere else in the business.

Where does your benefits program sit today: cost center, or something closer to a profit center?

08/19/2026

"We are robbing women of this experience."

That's what Brittany George, founder of Her Consulting and author of "A Tale of Two Births," said while describing her second birth, an experience completely different from her first.

On The Business of Benefits, she described a labor without the interventions she had the first time around: no epidural, no induction, just her body doing what it was built to do. She calls it the closest she's ever felt to something spiritual, the most magical experience of her life.

Her conclusion wasn't a judgment on anyone else's choices. It was grief, on behalf of every woman who won't get the chance to have that experience, not because she doesn't want it, but because the system around childbirth in the United States isn't built to make it available to her.

For employers, this isn't just a personal story, it's a benefits story. Maternal health benefits, real support during pregnancy and birth, and options like doula coverage are exactly the kind of gap that can close for the employees depending on your plan.

If your current plan has never had a real conversation about maternal health support beyond standard delivery coverage, that conversation is overdue.

Watch Brittany George's full story on The Business of Benefits. Full episode linked below.

POSIWID: the purpose of a system is what it does.Spencer Smith, SVP at Pareto Health, uses this systems thinking princip...
08/18/2026

POSIWID: the purpose of a system is what it does.

Spencer Smith, SVP at Pareto Health, uses this systems thinking principle to reframe how employers should think about their health plan's performance.

The logic is simple, and uncomfortable. Whatever a system consistently produces is what it's actually designed to do, regardless of its stated mission or intent. Applied to a fully insured health plan: if the outcome, year after year, is rising costs and a shrinking plan design, that's not a string of bad luck. That's the system working exactly as built.

This reframe matters because it removes the excuses that keep employers stuck. It isn't about finding a better account manager, or negotiating harder at renewal, or hoping next year is different. If the underlying system is built to produce rising costs, better negotiating will only ever slow the increase, not reverse it.

For CFOs and CHROs, the practical version of POSIWID is a simple question: is your current health plan structure actually working? Not "is the carrier a good company," not "is the service acceptable," but is the plan producing the outcomes you actually need, on cost and on coverage.

If the honest answer has been no for several years running, POSIWID suggests the fix isn't a better negotiation. It's a different system entirely.

What outcome has your current plan actually been producing?

"When you take me on that trip to Aruba, I want more."That's how Mark Cuban, entrepreneur, Shark Tank investor, and co-f...
08/17/2026

"When you take me on that trip to Aruba, I want more."

That's how Mark Cuban, entrepreneur, Shark Tank investor, and co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs, describes the real function of long RFP tenure requirements.

On the surface, a requirement like "ten years in business" or "fifty thousand lives under management" sounds like reasonable due diligence. In practice, Mark's argument is that these requirements exist mainly to exclude smaller, newer, and often more transparent vendors from ever being considered, protecting the incumbents already collecting a check from the big three insurance companies and PBMs.

The "trip to Aruba" line isn't really about a vacation. It's about the incentive structure underneath a lot of broker and consultant relationships: additional perks and payments that have nothing to do with whether the employer is actually getting the best deal.

For CFOs and CHROs running an RFP process, this is worth a direct look at your own requirements. Are you screening for tenure and headcount, or for actual results and alignment of interests? Those aren't the same thing, and a process built around the wrong one will keep protecting the wrong vendors.

The next time a smaller, newer partner can't meet an arbitrary tenure requirement but can show real, measurable savings, which requirement should actually win?

08/17/2026

$3,200 under the traditional plan. $300 for the same claim under reference-based pricing.

One EOB, two prices, and the gap changed how one HR leader saw the entire healthcare system.

On The Business of Benefits, Stephanie Porrino described the moment the tide turned for her. She was defending an 18 percent renewal increase to leadership at her company, and she needed to see the real numbers before she'd accept there was no better way. When her team finally ran an actual claim through both a traditional plan and a reference-based pricing model side by side, the difference wasn't 10 or 20 percent. It was more than ten times.

That's the moment, she says, the light bulb went on, not just about pricing, but about how misaligned the entire system really is. As she puts it, healthcare as it's built today isn't really designed around health. It's sick care, and the incentives prove it.

For CFOs and benefits leaders, this raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: has anyone at your company ever run a real claim through an alternative pricing model, side by side, to see what the actual cost of care should be? Most employers assume the number on the bill is the real cost. It rarely is.

If you've never seen this comparison for your own plan, it's worth the conversation.

Watch Stephanie explain the big lie on The Business of Benefits. Full episode linked below.

Address

333 S Garland Avenue FL 13
Orlando, FL
32801

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

Telephone

+14078034710

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Ethos Benefits posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Ethos Benefits:

Shortcuts

Share

Category