Name: Rising Costs, Rising Stakes: Building a Benefits Strategy for 2026
Uploaded: 2025-08-27T19:16:15.875Z
Duration: 46 min 40 s
Description: Rising Costs, Rising Stakes: Building a Benefits Strategy for 2026

Transcript for "Rising Costs, Rising Stakes: Building a Benefits Strategy for 2026": Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar. We are just gonna wait a few more minutes for people to trickle in. While we are waiting, please drop in the chat where you are calling in from today. I see a few people have already done so. Looks like we have a good spread. Britta, I am also in Denver. Atlanta, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Tucson. Love it. Alright. Let's go ahead and get started for today's session on how to build a benefit strategy in 2026. Before we dive in, I do want to go over a few housekeeping items. We will have time for q and a at the end of the presentation. You can use that q and a function on the right of the screen to submit questions as we go along also. For our SHRM certified professionals, you will receive an email from us about your credit after the call via email. And then finally, this session will be recorded and sent out to everyone in attendance. Alright. Let's get started with some introductions. My name is Sarah Wade. I lead our benefits advising team here at Rippling where we advise customers on their benefit strategies. My background is in small group benefits, advising customers across the country, especially at their time of renewal. I joined Rippling about four years ago and I've spent most of my time primarily focused on PEO. I've been an adviser, I've been a manager, and now I'm the director of the PEO benefits advising team. But I'm super excited to introduce Anne Wilson. Anne is currently the executive vice president of employee benefits at Hub International, a leading brokerage. She is a a true expert in the space as she has over twenty years of experience in the insurance industry and has worked with a range of clients from small businesses to companies with over 40,000 employees. Her her specialty is really working on complex and multiemployer programs like PEOs, and she has been at Hub for over thirteen years serving in account management, consulting, and leadership roles. Welcome, Anne. Thank you so much, Sarah. Excited to be here. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Let's, let's go ahead and do a poll here. We're going to start with this quick poll to hear from all of you. You can find it on the right side of the screen in between chat and q and a. We want to know what is your number one priority for employee benefits in 2026. Is it attracting and retaining talent, managing raising costs, improving the employee experience, or staying compliant. Yep. I see we've got a lot of managing those rising costs. Yep. That is no surprise and definitely something that we will be chatting about today. Alright. Just, a quick lay of the land before we hop in. We are going to start by asking, you know, talking about what is happening in the market. From there, we will go on to a framework for evaluating your benefit strategy. And then like I said earlier, we will finish up with some of that q and a. With that, let's go ahead and get into it, Anne. I will let you take it away. Alright. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Well, you know, insurance market, a constantly changing space, and 2026 is no exception to that. There are a number of market forces that are shaping what the 2026 insurance pricing will look like. So let's dive in right here and just start with medical trends. So what is medical trends? It is simply the year over year cost difference between the cost of a medical service in one year versus the next. This year, medical trend is predicted to be at eight and a half percent. So a easy example to think of is if a medical visit cost a $100 in 2025, that visit will cost a $108.50 next year. Unfortunately, medical trend is now running the highest we've seen since 2012. This has been sustained over the last three years, and it does not seem to be declining. There are a number of factors though why we need to look or that we need to look at to understand why this is happening. So if you look at our scale here on the screen, you can see currently, unfortunately, there are more market factors leading to cost increases, so what we call cost drivers, versus factors that might decrease cost, what we call deflators. While there's no one particular cost driver we can blame, there are really three major drivers that I'd like to touch on today in greater detail to give you a better understanding of some of the underlying influences on insurance pricing. Let's start by discussing prescription drugs and their impact. So if you take a look here on the screen, there's no way to deny it. Prescription drug spending is on the rise, and it's not expected to slow down anytime soon. There are a couple of really important reasons why. So first, just like everything else in the world right now, the cost to manufacture drugs has increased. So just like in any other industry, pharmaceutical businesses have seen what we call CPI inflation from things like higher materials costs, higher labor costs, higher transportation costs, and then in the recent time frame, tariff exposures. But this in and of itself is not the only reason these costs are going up. It's also being compounded by increases in utilization. Americans by and large are just taking more drugs. This year, about sixty one percent of Americans reported taking at least one drug a day. Twenty seven percent of Americans reported taking four or more drugs a day. And then, of course, as we age, we take even more. You know, 2024, CDC Centers for Disease, look, they did a study, and it showed that a whopping eighty eight percent of adult 65 years or older take at least more than one or drug one or more drug a day. Why are we taking so many drugs? A really great example of this is what's happened recently with GLP ones. GLP ones, you probably know them better by their brand names, Ozempic, Manjarno, Wegovy, and Zepbound. These drugs were originally introduced a number of years ago to treat type two diabetes, and the FDA expanded their ability to be used for weight loss a couple of years ago. Now while the class of drugs has been in the market for years, as you can see on the screen, the utilization of these drugs skyrocketed when awareness of their effectiveness and weight loss began to hit social media and good old direct to consumer advertising, what you might think of as commercials. If you look at the chart, you can see that the growth in Americans with employer sponsored health coverage, meaning what you all offer to your employees, using a GLP one medication exploded in 2023, and it's really only continued to rise. Now just as a sense of awareness, these drugs cost about a thousand to $1,500 a month. So far more expensive than traditional treatments for diabetes and weight loss. So as more and more individuals take the medications, the impact to health care costs also rise. GLP, one drug, so, again, the Ozempic, the Menjarnas, the Wegovis, these are considered by most insurance companies top cost inflators for 2026. We talked about that medical trend going up eight and a half percent for next year. GLP ones alone are considered a half to a full percent of that eight and a half percent medical cost trend. So this is not, small potatoes as we like to call it. Just one drug class is considering a con or is contributing a considerable amount to those increases that all of us are experiencing in our medical costs. But it's not all drugs. There's other cost factors weighing in as well. Treatment costs are also inflating year over year. Now you might have heard a recent headline, was about a six month old baby with an incurable genetic condition. I think the baby was in, New Jersey. Child's parents were told that grave news, unfortunately, your child is not likely to survive. However, luckily for the family, the hospital actually was able to save his life by providing a ground breaking CRISPR based gene gene therapy, which basically edited his own genome, reinfused it back into the child, and that would actually help, maybe not cure, but significantly improve that child's chances of living a long life. Within three months of receiving that treatment, that baby went from being incurable and terminal to being released from the hospital to go home with the hospital to go home with the family. You know, genetic therapies like this have ability the ability to transform how we treat disease. We're talking about a completely different look on how we treat conditions across the the board for for many people. This is offering not just the potential to manage symptoms, but to even potentially cure or dramatically slow progression of diseases. So that's great news. We all like to hear that. But unfortunately, like other breakthrough health technologies, they come with a very, very steep price tag. Most expensive gene therapy treatment on the market today costs 4 and a quarter million dollars a treatment. So when we have expansion of these kinds of therapies multiplied by the number of people eligible for them, health care costs will continue to go up across the entire ecosystem. Now there's one other driver across the health care space that doesn't get as much attention but continues to impact health care pricing all across the country, and that's provider negotiations. Maybe in the past year or so, you or a family member might have received a letter from your doctor or your insurance company, and the letters go something like this. Unfortunately, you know, Aetna has not agreed to update our reimbursement rates. It's not keeping pace with rising health care costs. Does it reflect our actual cost to provide care? You know, we can invest in technologies. We can invest in staffing, etcetera. Why the letters? Right? Well, all of these letters or communications are result of provider negotiations with insurance companies. Medical providers and hospitals have agreed upon contracts that we knew about every two to three years. The contracts that prices a doctor or hospital can charge for any service to an insurance company. Basically, it's the contract that sits behind everything that they provide. And then in turn, that contract allows excuse me, allows you to have guaranteed rates for twelve months. Right? You contract with the insurance company, and that's how you pay for your coverage. While this process has generally flown under the radar, in the last two years, we have seen some incredibly volatile, negotiations. Recent one between Aetna and University of Washington. We were looking at 27% requested cost increases from the medical system. So when the providers and insurance companies go out to the public, they sort of bring this war out into, you know, a much broader, context of negotiation than we've seen in the past. Eventually, what happens is in most cases, the medical system will come to an agreement with the insurance company. But if those agreements fall on, you know, double digit cost increases, that increases cost to everybody across the entire country. So significant, you know, contributor to that that medical cost trend we talked about earlier. Now it's not all bad news. We do have an area where we're seeing a little bit of improvement in terms of what might help decrease costs. Again, referring to that as a deflator. Biosimilars are a great example of this. So biosimilars are really thought of as like a generic form of a specialty medication. They're designed to treat the same diseases as the same way in the same way, but typically at a lower cost than what that original drug, cost before their patent expires. So an example of this is Humira. It's biosimilar. There's there's about seven of them. One of them is called Simlanti. You may have heard of it. Humira's annual claim cost, so the cost of Humira back to the insurance company in the plan, is about 40 to $50,000 a year. Simlanti, that biosimilar, costs about 50% less than that. So when you have a patient that moves from a brand name drug to the biosimilar drug, that helps us all in terms of decreasing the ongoing cost to our plans. So right now, there's about 76 biosimilars that the FDA has approved. There's about 50 of them out on the market. So as more of these biosimilars are released, it'll help offset some of the other cost increases that we were just talk talking about and reviewing. Sarah, back to you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Anne, for setting, you know, the stage for this year's landscape. Let's go ahead and chat about what you can do to set yourself up for success and build a strong benefits strategy. So our advising team came up with this framework to build an informed benefit strategy. The first step is going to be educating yourself and understanding the benefits landscape, which is exactly what we are doing today. The second step is to identify gaps in your current strategy, and finally, you need to choose the right benefits partner that's going to make sense for your company's needs. So step one starts with education. Understanding what's happening in the market like those rising costs and shifting coverage trends, it helps you understand what is going into your renewal increase or the cost of the benefits that you're looking at for the first time, And it also helps you make those informed decisions as you move forward. So I just like to comment on this. You might have seen this guy before. Maybe you recognize him from trying to sell car insurance. Believe it or not, car insurance can be used as a really good analogy to how health insurance is priced. So for example, if you have a great driving record, most drivers around you are avoiding accidents, your rates stay pretty much steady, and you receive nominal increases year over year just sort of for the average, cost increase that that anyone might expect. But when you have an accident, the insurance company passes on a larger renewal to you because they have to absorb the cost of fixing your car as well as potentially the car the other person that was in the accident. The same holds true with replacement cost of cars. If you're driving maybe a late model nineties Camry, it's a lot different than if you have to replace or fix maybe a brand new '25 Mercedes. If you compound that across the entire population, if more people get in more accidents, then that increase in cost also gets spread across everybody's insurance premiums. Well, health insurance is very similar. So when we have more people using more prescription drugs or using more expensive medical treatments or even paying higher overall bills for the same services that they had in the prior year, the amount that we all pay for for our insurance increases. Premiums are calculated by insurance company companies to cover their existing losses as well as cover losses that are predicted for the future. So as car insurance goes, so health insurance goes as well. Yeah. I I love that analogy, Anne. You know, we, as advisers, chat with a lot of administrators that get to their renewal, see their increase, and are understandably frustrated. Right? And one of the first questions is is almost always, like, why or or how did this happen? And in order to figure out how to move forward, it's really important to understand what goes into those insurance costs and and how it works. Right? But please, you know, don't stop there. Spend more than than ten minutes on your renewal. Understand that there are options out there and take this opportunity to look into them. This is you know, health care costs are are a a huge business cost, and and you have to do your due diligence. What what works one year might not fit your business needs moving forward. Let's move into step two of the framework, which is evaluating your current strategy and figuring out where you want to go with your benefits. Here are three benefits metrics that you can use to evaluate your current strategy. Your benefit enrollment rate, your employee satisfaction, and then cost per employee. So that benefit enrollment rate is, of course, a quantitative metric. It's understanding how many employees are enrolled in benefits and which plans they're enrolled in. If you are a Rippling customer, you can easily get this data by running a report in your account. The opportunity here is really leveraging this data to understand what behavior your benefits package is incentivizing and kind of reading into your employees' needs. For example, if you are offering rich plans and contributing a high percentage of those costs, it shouldn't be a surprise that most employees are enrolled in that most expensive option. In these cases, you want to think about how you can make lower cost plans more attractive for employees who might not need as rich of coverage. You can cover a higher percentage of of those lower cost plans to make them less costly to employees or contribute to something like an HSA account that can be paired with a high deductible health plan. On the other side, if you are having a low participation issue, think about how you can thoughtfully increase your contribution. This does not mean that you need to go from 50% to a 100%. Right? Rather, find an affordable plan option that the company can cover at a higher percentage and then focus on providing employees other plan options if they have higher needs. Secondly, we have employee satisfaction. To facilitate this, consider pulling employees in something like our poll surveys to understand what they think of the benefit offerings. I do wanna say that this can be a balancing act. Many people have strong opinions on benefits, and the reality is that every employee does have different needs. But a lot of times, these surveys can highlight opportunities for employee education, not just them, you know, sharing their opinion on the benefits that you're offering, and that's really valuable too. Finally, you do wanna understand your current cost per employee and come to an amount that you're comfortable with that being after renewal. We know that renewal increases happen every year, and you want to know that you have the budget to continue offering your existing package as that headcount grows. Make sure you're thoughtfully building a package not only for your current employees, but one that will work for the entire plan year and any employees that you're planning on hiring in the future. And that brings us to our next slide, some examples of questions you wanna ask yourself as you start to map out your strategy. If you aren't planning on adding much headcount in the next year and your goal is to maintain affordability as a business, you might need to focus out focus on quoting out to, you know, various options, updating your contribution, adding those lower cost plans that I that I mentioned. Or maybe on the other side, you wanna attract top engineering talent this year. In that case, you wanna make sure you're putting together a package that offers robust and varied coverage. This isn't only about medical plans. Your benefits package should be thought about holistically across medical, dental, vision, life and disability, tax advantage accounts like HSA, FSA, and commuter, mental health programs, infertility support, etcetera. And that highlights something I wanna make really clear. You shouldn't make assumptions about your employees' needs. When admins are putting together a benefits package for the first time, a common misconception that my team deals with is a tendency to assume that they need to only offer the very richest plan at the very highest contribution in order to offer a strong package. But it would be super rare for every employee in your company to have the same high health needs. Right? And what can happen a lot in these situations is that it's actually the insurance company that's that's really winning here, not necessarily your company or your employees because the insurance company is bringing in those premiums even though not everyone is actually actually utilizing that coverage. Right? So we highly recommend that you prioritize offering employees choice. Make sure you offer plans that can meet those different employee needs. You may have employees that want the money you would be spending on health care back in their paychecks because they don't have those needs. Right? Give them that option. Let them choose what is best for them. Okay. We have made it to step three, which is choosing the right benefits partner for your needs. The two most common options here when it comes to a benefits partner are going to be a PEO and a broker, and we'll go into, each of these a little bit deeper. What is a PEO? A PEO is a professional employer organization. It provides support on HR, benefits, and compliance through a coemployment model. These are usually good fits for small and medium sized businesses under about a 100 employees who may not have a dedicated HR team. They want to, you know, offload HR, admin, and compliance work, and they're looking for a plethora of benefit options to attract and retain talent. I do wanna note, when you are looking at different PEOs, some things to look out for. Of course, benefits at affordable rates, but also benefit support for your employees. For example, on Rippling's PEO, we offer a service called Rightway, which helps employees find high quality, cost effective care, through benefits navigation. You also wanna make sure you're getting comprehensive compliance support, including payroll tax accounts, EPLI, workers' comp, all those additional filings and services. And most importantly, like I've mentioned a few times, you wanna make sure your PEO can grow and scale with you. As we've mentioned, business needs do and should change over time. You need to make sure that the PEO or whatever solution you're choosing isn't something that only works for a year or two and then you feel trapped. Right? Rippling's PEO was designed with this specifically in mind because we recognize that PEOs might not make sense forever, and we want to grow and scale right there with you. I'm gonna let Anne talk about partnering with a broker. Yeah. Absolutely. So if you're not familiar with with what a broker does, we are licensed professionals, and our job is to help businesses find and enroll health insurance plans from what we call the open market, meaning all of those insurance companies that are out there in the world. Our job is to help you understand your options, help price out the different types of plans available to you, and then present those to you so that you can make educated choices for your employees. We're generally paid through the insurance company, that we place the benefits through. A lot of people don't really understand that that's how it works. Who is this great for? You know, obviously, PEOs aren't gonna work for everyone as Sarah mentioned. Larger businesses tend to work through insurance brokerages and consultants, maybe clients that have dedicated HR or benefits teams, folks that really spend their day thinking about total rewards and the types of benefits that are offered to, an employer or an employee population. Advantages of working with a broker, we have very deep expertise. While I don't like to brag about it, I've been doing this for more than twenty years. So this is my bread and butter, and it's what I do every day. Really spend a lot of time educating ourselves on the products and the information that influences the pricing to you, the the employer. There's also a common misperception out there that we negotiate rates. This is true in certain circumstances, but in many markets, we don't have that power. I'll give you an example. You're a small employer depending upon the state that you're in. Those rates are created by what we call community rating. They're developed on the entire community at large and not just your employer. It's important to when you're working with the broker to understand the difference and working with the broker that can actually explain that and help you understand the options for your organization. There's another, you know, advantage to working with a broker is being able to place all of the different benefits you might offer to an employee. So it's not just about medical. Right? We've talked a lot about that today. But we really wanna make sure you're offering a wide offering medical, dental, vision, ancillary coverages, even things like pet insurance. So, it's really a great opportunity for us to engage with you and talk about all of those different things that you can bring to the table. How do you find a broker? There's a couple of different ways. So first off, you can work with what we call third party broker. That would be someone like me. There's a whole bunch of us out there in the world, but you need to make sure you're asking brokers about what they're offering to you, what sort of services they'll provide to you other than just giving you some rates. Do they help support your employees during the year, during open enrollment? Are there other services that they can offer that are free? Are there services they can offer that you you might pay for? And then which employees can they help? You know, brokerages like ours, they we work on a global scale. Is that important to your organization? Do you have a global footprint? You know, there are other, you know, factors, dedicated account management, what, you know, what kind of support do you have for you and your employees, all very important questions to to ask. You can also use a brokerage provided by your HR platform. So, Rippling's a great example of that. Rippling has its own brokerage for servicing clients that are are smaller size that may not need all the bells and whistles that a third party brokerage can offer. If you are, you know, not necessarily a fit for PEO with Rippling but still interested in working with them, you know, please ask your Rippling account team about their services in that regard. Alright. I think, you know, if there's something we've been stressing this this entire presentation, it really is that benefits are not one size fits all. Right? Your company needs change every year, and your benefits strategy should too. Do not let yourself feel boxed into what you've been doing just because you don't know what else is out there, and the insurance industry is a confusing landscape. Right? Keep yourself informed, figure out where opportunities are in your strategy, and choose the right partner to help you make decisions and find a solution. Rippling is ready to support you through those needs, whether it's working with an outside broker, a PEO, small group of Rippling, or any other option. And with that, we will move into q a. Please continue to drop your questions as they come up in that q and a feature. We will get to as many as we can in the time left. Alright here. First question, does using a PEO offer competitive advantage in terms of benefit rates and offerings? I can take that one, Sarah. At least I can start that one for you. So, benefits rates and offerings. So it's a really good question. On the benefit side, it sort of depends on the size of your organization as to whether or not a PEO's benefit offering would be different or better than what you can get out in the marketplace. For small employers, generally speaking, there is an advantage to the PEO. You'll you'll be able to provide a larger menu of options and sometimes a more competitive benefits package through a PEO than than the open market. As you grow and you're larger, sometimes that benefits differentiation can can change or fade. Rates are a different story. Rates are really, dependent organization to organization when you look at a PEO. Your own population becomes much more important to, to an organization when we're looking at rating in a PEO versus that example I just used, community ratings, small group. It really doesn't matter who you are and who your people are. The rates are really developed across a much larger population. So we'd encourage you to go through that evaluation if you're considering it. Take a look and have your your population, evaluated and quoted to help you get an understanding of which option is really best for you. Absolutely. I I agree with that. I think the other thing in small group is sometimes the the underwriting rules can be restrictive where on PEOs, there are, there's some more flexibility on that in terms of where people are located, what plans you have available, and and and sometimes just the offerings. There are are larger offerings on a PEO. But like Anne said, it it really is so dependent on your company, and that is why we absolutely recommend getting quoted in in multiple places. Right? Get a PEO quote, get a small group quote, you know, work with with a broker to figure out what works for your company this year. Second here, can a broker advise on other benefit options like self funded plans? So absolutely, yes. So one of the, great things about working with a third party brokerage is that we can offer education and quoting on all sorts of different types of plans. So fully insured, self funded, partially self funded, captives, ICRA, you name it. There are lots of products out there on the market, and it's, our responsibility actually to bring you a smattering of those options. And more importantly to understand where you're at in your life cycle as an organization and which one of those options might be right for you. You know, different, times in organizational growth may lead to different priorities in terms of what you're paying, how you're paying for it, and the risk tolerance that you wanna take on. So it's really important to ask again those questions if you're engaging with a third party broker. Let's see here. One question. I am offering benefits for the first time. What should I know? Wow. Really great question. Yes. So, you know, other than some of the basics, meaning what are the different coverages that are available to offer to an employee population? So that's that's a starting point. You know, what can you offer? Medical, dental, vision, life, disability, etcetera. So that's sort of stop number one. What are you willing to offer? Number two is really how much are you willing to invest in paying for it? Because once you develop a budget, or an idea of what your budget might be, that will really help you then answer, what exactly you'll be able to offer and and afford. Secondly is in terms of offering benefits, there is an administrative burden. You have to have a vehicle to enroll your employees. You have to have a vehicle to charge them payroll deductions. That's where Rippling would come in both, you know, sort of on the technology side or even if you don't really have the internal support, then maybe the PEO side. The PEO is a great option for employers that just don't have the the sort of HR horsepower to do some of that administration. Of course, other benefits as well in compliance and other services. But, really, it's starting at the very step one is is what do I want to provide and how much am I gonna pay for it, because that those two pieces will really help you dictate the next steps in your journey on on deciding which path is right for you. Beyond health insurance, what are other benefits to consider for talent retention and employee satisfaction? Great question. So, one of the biggest, benefits that provides an advantage to employees are things like, HSA health savings accounts, where you pair a health savings account with what we call a high deductible health plan. Why is that a huge advantage? Well, not only is it giving you a really great vehicle to provide benefits to your employees to access medical care, it's also giving them a tax advantaged, savings account that they can then deposit funds into to then help grow a a little sort of nest egg, if you will, to help pay for medical and even future retirement expenses. For highly compensated employees, it becomes another tax shelter, frankly. So, there's vehicles such as as health savings accounts that we find that are really important. We also like to round out what we call the employee life cycle. So there can be benefits, like what we call voluntary or worksite benefits, things like, hospital indemnity programs. They pay cash if somebody goes to the hospital. I mentioned pet insurance. You know, huge amount of pandemic pets out there that people need help taking care of. So it's it's may seem like a frivolous benefit that can be very meaningful to the right employee. And there's other, you know, tax advantage benefits out there as well, flexible spending accounts, dependent care accounts. So there's a pretty wide variety of things that we can offer employees today and, again, really trying to figure out the right menu, depending upon your your tolerance and and how many things that you wanna be able to explain to your employee. Obviously, working with Rippling, working with a broker can help communicate those things as well. What is the maximum number of plans typically available to employees? So it's gonna depend on your client size and what vehicle you're using. Right? So, if you're in a PEO, PEOs have a very broad menu. Let's just call it the cracker barrel of options, meaning I use them because they're in the news. Because you have sort of that salad bar approach. Right? You have a very, very wide menu. There's all sorts of things to choose from and different ways to offer at different price points, etcetera. You know, outside of that, if you're in a small group marketplace, your care may limit the number of plan options you can offer. Large group, that is certainly the case. What we find is for employers, as they grow larger, they offer fewer and fewer plan choices to their employees. It's really important though to understand kind of what Sarah was talking about earlier. Really don't make an assumption for your employees in terms of of how many different options that you should have. We would highly encourage you to consider at least three, just because that's gonna give you sort of a low, middle, high approach for most of your employees. But, you know, sky's the limit when it comes to some of the different choices that you might have depending upon the environment that you're offering those benefits in. Yeah. And I think doubling down on that point when we talk about offering choice, right, it doesn't mean we're offering 10 different plans because employees could need you know, all of my employees need a different plan to enroll in. When I mean choice, I mean very clear distinctions, right, between the plans that you're offering. You don't need to offer a 300 deductible and a 500 deductible and a seven fifty deductible. You're making clear distinctions for those different employee needs, but it doesn't mean you need to offer a million options. Definitely. Is biosimilar the same as generic? That's a really good question. So, my answer is gonna be kind of. I know super specific. Right? So let's talk about drugs in general. So when you have a regular, drug, it goes through a a a life cycle where it's developed by a pharmaceutical company and then released to the market. In that phase of its life cycle, it's called a brand name drug, and it simply means that only that manufacturer makes the drug. It's probably under a patent, so it's protected for a specific number of years so that that manufacturer is the only one that can make it. When that patent expires, that drug moves into the next phase of its life cycle, and that's when we come up with generics. Generics mean that multiple manufacturers can make the drug. It's the same essential drug, but it may have a couple of different, changes to the vehicle in which the drug is housed. So when you take a pill, for example, you have the active part of the drug and then you have the filler, which is basically most of the pillows, that white powdery stuff. Biosimilars function very similarly in the life cycle, but they're for different kinds of medications. Biosimilars and specialty medications are really targeted what we call molecule drugs. They're typically self injectable drugs, rarely oral drugs meaning pills, but they follow the same life cycle as sort of a brand name to a generic. When they are a specialty medication, they're made by one company. That company has a patent on that molecule, and they're the only ones that can make it. When that patent expires, that molecule can then be manufactured by other, you know, corporations or businesses, and that's what a biosimilar is. So it's very much like a generic drug, but just a little bit different on the actual chemical background of how that drug is delivered. Great question. Next one, we only have 12 full time employees. I feel limited on choices we can offer. Is there a minimum number of employees? So minimum number of employees for a group is two. Believe it or not, obviously, one person does not make a group, so we always need two to tango. In the open market, depending upon your insurance carrier, there will be a limit to the number of plans that you can offer in a smaller employer. Again, I would recommend no more than three, in your scenario, but I would definitely consider offering at least that many if possible. And the reason I say that is because there's different plan types in the medical community depending upon where you have employees. You might have HMO or you might only have PPO. If you're only in a PPO environment, you may wanna consider offering again that low, medium, high. Maybe you have employees that would like Kaiser, if you're in a Kaiser state versus employees that would wanna work with an Aetna or other open markets carrier. So there's not really, a minimum number of employees, but depending upon the insurance company, they may, look at a different number of plans minimum and maximum based on your size. Oh, what do you think makes Rippling PEO unique compared to other PEOs? Sarah, do you wanna start with that one? Like I said earlier in in the the presentation, I think truly one of the unique pieces is, that Rippling PEO and and Rippling overall does want to scale with your company. Right? I think we're one we we have this uniqueness in the market, where we we don't think that you should stay on a PEO forever, you know, where we don't think all all groups should stay on a PEO forever. And we're even seeing that at this renewal, right, where there are groups that might have outsized renewal increases that it doesn't make sense to be on PEO anymore, and and we are actively trying to get open market quotes for them, right, to to move there, but still giving them, you know, the option if it if it still makes sense for PEO. I I do think that that the fact that you don't have to completely rip out off of your your, your platform, the PEO platform and move something, everything else over, really is is that distinguisher, in in the market. Yeah. I'd have to agree, Sarah, and I I think that's really a key point. Some other PEO providers, if you go from that PEO experience to a non PEO experience, well, some of them may don't even offer that, so we'll start there. And then two, if you do go through that migration in your life cycle, I feel like that migration is much smoother with Rippling because you're all still in that same technology portal, same same group of folks that see you through the journey. So, I would really list that as one of the number one advantages. Yep. Will Rippling work with brokers or does Rippling become the broker? It's a good question. I think it depends on your size, Sarah. Yeah. It it can be both. Right? Rippling can be can broker, companies in small groups specifically, usually under, about 25. We we absolutely do work with other brokers. We kind of call that bring your own broker. So, again, there are our options in in both of the ways. We are considering moving off a fixed reimbursement ICRA model 15 employees. Are there things you would suggest considering for moving to either a PEO or group plan? So you're talking about not just apples and oranges, almost like, you know, apples and cantaloupe, I guess. So, you know, ICRA's are plans that are out on the individual market. You, the employer, are helping to fund the cost of those plans through a health reimbursement account. When you start to move out of the individual market and start looking at moving into either what we call a traditional health plan or even a PEO environment, the benefits are going to change. What you'll find is moving from the benefit offering in an ICRA environment, the benefit designs themselves, think of things like deductibles and out of pocket maximums, they're actually going to go down, meaning the individual market has much higher, out of pocket maximums and deductibles when you compare them to the traditional space or the PEO space. If you go out to the traditional market straight from an ICRA, you need to start becoming your own benefit sponsor again. Right? So now you are picking plans for your employees. They're not picking their own. You were determining the menu that we've been talking about of what you wanna offer, and you're now looking at contributing to those plans in a different way. Instead of it just being a sort of fixed dollar amount that the ICRA vendor calculates, you are now, sitting behind the driver's wheel, if you will, or the steering wheel to start making those decisions. Whether or not you go to the traditional market or the PEO market, there again, back to those reasons. Do you have a staff of team members that can help support the administration? Or do you need help on the compliance side of things when you're offering benefits? Unfortunately, we spend a lot of time working on compliance in the benefit space. And then, again, who your population is may really help determine if the PEO is a right fit. We'd encourage you to look at both. I think it's always best to make those informed decisions. Sometimes price point will be the decision point number one, but sometimes some of those other factors will really help you determine what's the best fit for your company. Absolutely. Okay. We are going to wrap up here. Thank you so much for such great q and a there. Before you go, we would love your feedback. You will see a quick survey pop up on your screen. Please take a minute to let us know your thoughts about today's session. It would be greatly appreciated. Alright. Thank you so much, everyone. I hope everyone has a great day. Take care.