What’s the Current Average for Employee Benefits? $753 Premium, 78% Employer Paid.

Alright, we are going to be conscious of everybody's time. So we're going to go ahead and get rolling. Today, we are going to show you how your benefits compare to the open market in the Southeast, national, and in South Carolina for the under 50 markets. We're going to show how your deductible stacks up, how your employer contribution, how your employee contribution, your plan design all stack up. Going to be a tremendous amount of information. I'm excited and honored to be joined by Matt Wilson from Scott Insurance. Matt's here representing this data from Miller and my name is Matt Vaity. I'm with Guru Payroll and HR. And Matt, why don't you go ahead and get us kicked off here?

Awesome. Glad to do it. Thanks, Matt. So benchmarking the benefits data to help you guys as you're looking at your renewals going into open enrollment. This should be able to validate some of the details that you're going to be seeing and making decisions on. So, I'm going to jump in with the agenda we've got for you. We're going to look at the medical side first. That's going to be the most, the biggest line item on your budget. Second, we'll hit dental and vision, go through some other benefits, and if we've got time, I do have some high-cost claim conditions to give you some benchmarks on what's going on in the healthcare community. But what you're going to discover as we go through this is how the Guru PEO, how their plan designs compare, how their cost falls, and how their benefits are competitive and validate kind of for the clients, how you guys can validate it yourself against the benchmarks.

Matt, if I hang in here through this, I mean, what am I gonna be able to do with this information? What's the value of this information to me as a business owner?

Yeah, as a business owner, this is gonna be important for a couple reasons. One, you need to validate, does your strategy, how does it compare against the benchmarks? If you're just offering benefits just because you want to be compliant, That's one thing. If you're trying to be the best of the best, you need to know what other people are doing. So we're gonna show you that today. What are your peers doing? How do I compare? And that way you'll validate, does your strategy— are you executing on your strategy the way you want to?

Excellent.

Sounds good. So great question there leading into this that I do want to pinpoint that last question there. You can use some of this data to communicate with employees. So, a lot— employees do not know this data and some don't care. But as a business owner, when you're dumping a ton of money into benefits, you need to be proud of that and share that with your employees. So, some of this data, take notes and you can share it during your open enrollment with your employees. All right. So, understanding some of the stuff we're gonna look at. We've got national, national benchmark. There's gonna be a little over 20,000 companies all over the US. Regional is gonna cover North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia. And then the small group is gonna be that 50 employee and under. So we'll look at all 3 in the graphs. So you'll be able to see that. Some of you out there that may need some specific industry or different regions, get with the Guru Team. They'll get with me and we can definitely cut, cut some benchmark data differently if you need it. We're gonna start off with the PPO plan. So as we're looking at these benchmarks, these are gonna be the median. So this is the 50th percentile. So you got half of your peers are gonna be worse than this, half are gonna be better. So when we start out on the deductible side, this is one item employees are starting to learn what that deductible is, because a lot of that is what they've got skin in the game, they need to pay. So, if I look at the blue-sided line, it's gonna be the national, and then that blue, the light blue color is gonna be small group. So, when they're the same, it's gonna give you kind of a dash-looking line, and that's what that $1,500 line is going horizontally. Is the green is going to be that region. So you can see the benchmarks are a little different. The region's at the $2,000 benchmark, and national and small group is at $1,500. So that's the benchmark to know. So if you want to be better than most, then you're going to need to have this Gold One plan or have a plan with a deductible that's going to be better than $1,500 if you want to beat. At benchmark is going to be more that Gold Two. And then as you move to left to right, some of the plans offered for different strategies, typically saving money, would be driving those deductibles up. So, you can see there are plans better. We look at this, we're working with the Guru team on what do we need to be offering clients. And we'll make some changes with maybe even a $500 deductible starting in July to even beat that benchmark even better. So, we're constantly looking at this every single year and redoing what plan designs we're offering groups. I'm gonna go next to the coinsurance. Coinsurance is really the— it's after the deductible, and it's what members pay, a percentage of what they pay before they meet maximum out-of-pocket. So, as your members pay their deductible, they meet that, then they go into a coinsurance. So, what this is telling me is the benchmark national is 30%. So, that means once— for nationally, once a member meets their deductible, they'll pay 30% of the healthcare bill. Until they reach maximum out-of-pocket. And I'll show that number next. So, coinsurance is not a huge factor, but it can play a role in the member expense. You can see the small and regional benchmarks at 20%, and pretty much all the plans that Guru is offering is kind of that 20%. The most at Silver's at 40%. So, we're kind of right at that benchmark when you look at coinsurance. Next is the out-of-pocket, which I was just talking about. So, once a member meets their deductible, pays coinsurance. That out-of-pocket max number is very important because that's the worst-case scenario for a member. So, if I'm looking at a plan, these numbers would be for a 12-month period. What's the worst thing my member is going to pay? Look at the out-of-pocket maximum to figure that out. So, the benchmark for all 3, interesting enough, all 3 are at the $5,000 amount. So, $5,000 is the median. We've got 2 plans that are less than that. So this Gold One, for example, has a $3,000 maximum out-of-pocket. So that member is going to pay $3,000, and then the healthcare company is going to pay the rest of it, like Blue Cross Blue Shield, for example. And these on the far right, like Bronze Two, it's got an $8,700 maximum out-of-pocket maximum. That would be the worst-case scenario if the member was on Bronze Two. So, key to remember here is the $5,000 number. That's what today's median benchmark is for maximum out-of-pocket.

How much do you think people overvalue or undervalue out-of-pocket max? It seems like a really critical decision factor with people that are enrolling in plans. So oftentimes in our environment, an employee is going to have multiple options, right? 2 to 3 different plans they can enroll into. And, you know, you might see, so for example, I'm on the Silver III high deductible plan with my family, which means my out-of-pocket max is going to be higher. How much do you think people over or underestimate the employee importance of that.

Yeah, I think because it is a kind of the worst case scenario, a lot of people are just worried about a copay or deductible amount and really aren't looking at this quite as much. And this number, to put it in perspective, if we've got time at the end, I'm going to show you some claims where the prescription or an average claimant on the high side could be hundreds of thousands of dollars. So if I'm getting care, it's, I've got half a million dollars in claims. And I can cap out at $8,000, you know, I consider that a win. So, in that, and I'm more of a risk taker where I don't think I'm going to get sick. So, I would rather have a little less coming out of my paycheck and go with a higher out-of-pocket maximum. And then if something catastrophic did happen, I know I've got a cap of this $8,000. But part of it is about educating the workforce and, you know, having some money set aside if you can. And then depending on your risk structure, if you're less risky, then maybe you do want to have more of this you know, the Gold One, where it's a $3,000 maximum. But I think one thing that people don't know or don't think about is when you do go in a hospital and you have catastrophic care, 99 times out of 100, the hospital is going to work with you on a payment plan to get it back, right? So when you get an $8,000 bill, the hospital is going to say, hey, we'll work with you to pay that $8,000 off over the next 24 months. And typically it's interest-free. So there's a lot of different ways where if you do run into the situation of big claims, you can work with the entity to get a payment plan set up.

Excellent.

Thank you. All right. On the PPO, which when you hear PPO, the copays are going to go along with that. And these are starting to look at the copay benchmarks and PCP is the first one on the left. PCP is going to stand for primary care. Physician. So this is going to be your family doctor. Going in for strep throat, ear infection, those type things. So the benchmark, again, all 3 right around that $25 mark. So you go in, you're gonna pay $25, you know what the copay is going to be, you walk out and leave. These plans show you on the gray bars, the gold is a $20 copay, 2 is $25, and then it goes all the way to bronze 2, which is a $60 copay. Quickly, you're gonna see a visit, if you did not pay a copay, you're gonna be in that $100 to $200 range if you did not have copays. So the copays are for two things: one, to lower your out-of-pocket costs when you do go, but also give you that transparency that you know you're gonna pay $25 or whatever it may be when you go in. The specialist right beside it, that's gonna be, obviously, you're going to a specialist, that's gonna be more of the $200 to $500 per occurrence. And here the copays range from about $40 all the way up to $200 on the Bronze Plan. So, much, much wider spread, but if you didn't have that copay, you'd be looking at several hundreds of dollars for that visit. Finally, on the PPO plan, we're going to look at, for plan design, is going to be the copays for pharmacy. So, we got 4 quadrants here. You know, all prescriptions are going to fall into buckets. So, this first top left bucket is going to be generics.

If you've taken a medication and it falls into generic bucket.

The benchmarks are typically $10 to $15 per prescription. We're talking about a 30-day supply, so a monthly prescription. The member would be paying— national and small would be $10, regional would be $15. And this is the way we've set up for the PEO, for the Guru PEO. It's going to be lesser of the two, so it's either the cost of the drug or the copay, whichever is lesser. So, in this Gold One, for example, it's a $15 generic. If that generic actually only cost $8, then you would see an $8 cost, not the $15. So, these are max copays for that generic drug. Again, left to right, you're going to get that feel now, the richer plans on the left and then the Bronze plans to the right are less rich. To the right of that is the formulary copay. These are starting to talk about brand drugs that are on formulary, much more expensive. The benchmark is at $45. Amount. That's across-the-board benchmark. The gold plans are well under that, and then the silver plans, you can see one's right at benchmark, one's over. And then the bronze plans have percentages. This is your coinsurance. So bronze plans don't have copays for formulary. On formularies, bottom left, these are a little bit more expensive. You can see the benchmarks are getting up to around $65, $70 copay, and Guru's kind of matching that, staying right at the benchmarks for gold. Silver's creeping up, and again, Bronze is that coinsurance, not a copay. The final one, specialty copay. When you hear the term specialty, these are the ones that you're seeing the commercial. If you can sing a jingle on a drug that you watch so many times on TV, they are doing that on purpose. These are extremely expensive drugs, and the copays, the benchmarks, small groups $250, regional, national is $150. Much higher. The Gold is really good at $100, and then some of the other plans are right at benchmark as you go left to right. I'll pause there before we jump into the actual cost benchmarks. Any other questions, Matt?

No, but I like that. If you can sing a jingle, that's the problem, right? I mean, it's, you know, we've looked at some of the claims data here and oftentimes some of the largest claimants across the group are on specialty pharmaceuticals. And it's stunning to me how much these things cost. You know, some of them are avoidable, some are not. Is there anything employers can do to help educate their employees on being a smarter consumer of pharmaceuticals and not ultimately blowing up the employer plan without violating HIPAA or without doing anything that's going to put them in any form of jeopardy?

Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, communication in the pharmacy industry, I mean, just because a drug is new does not mean it's more effective than a drug that's been out for 20 years. So a new drug does not equal better efficacy. When the commercials say, ask your doctor about this drug, is that, is that really what you want to be doing? Or do you want to be relying on your doctor to recommend what they think is right. You know, I would just have the conversation. Just because you see a commercial, that doesn't mean it's the best drug for you. Talk to your doctors about generic drugs that are tried and true, that are proven to be effective. And you always want to start out with a generic before you start moving to a drug that you saw on TV. So that's called step therapy, trying, trying drugs that are cost-effective, that'll work, that are tried and true., and if those don't work, you can kind of step up to other things, but you don't want to immediately go to these drugs that you see on TV because quite frankly, the data that's out there, they're not the most effective in the market.

Hmm.

Interesting.

Scary.

Yeah. Scary to think that.

We'll go back. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, I was going to say, you would think though, you see the commercials, they're spending all this money, it's got to be really good and effective. And that's just not the case.

No, it's a rough industry. And, you know, we'll talk, Matt and I, before we jumped on, we're having a conversation about a conference he recently went to from Blue Cross Blue Shield and their answer to driving costs down. And we'll share that answer in just a little while. And I'm going to say you're going to be shocked.

Good, good cliffhanger there. All right, let's talk about some numbers here that's going to affect your budget and kind of give you a benchmark of where you are as a business owner when you start looking at data. So, PPO average only monthly premium. All right. Get your quotes, renewals. $761 for employee only is the, is the median nationally in the marketplace. Regionally, it's $753. So, Southeast is gonna save you a little bit of money, but not a lot. The small group is $761 as well. It's pretty consistent data here. The year over $700 for employee only. Now, below that in the blue is the employer subsidy. So, these are the benchmarks where it's typically, you know, you could basically say 78% for a copay plan is what employers are kicking in. That's leaving the members just over 20% that they're paying on their cost share, right? So, every year you get an opportunity to say, okay, this is what I'm gonna pay as a business owner. What's my employees gonna pay? This data kind of shows you where your peers are on that contribution.

All right. So, let me just make sure I understand this correctly. So, we've got If I'm in South Carolina and I'm a small group, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, I'm on average paying as the employer, the total premium is $753 for employee only. And then the average employer is kicking in 77% of that $753. And this is for a PPO plan, correct?

Correct. For a copay plan. That's right. That's exactly right. And then on the family side, so you can look at these numbers are really exploding. I mean, not too long ago, these were well under $2,000. But at this point, the median benchmark 50th percentile for a family, so this is going to be your, your employee with a spouse and children, a child or children, average is going to be around that $2,300 mark. You can see national $2,335, Southeast gives you a little bit of a break at $2,266, and then small at $2,379. Interestingly enough, below that, the employer percentage drops off quite a bit. You're in that low 60% range on copay plans where the employer is going to subsidize, leaving the member with closer to 40% of the cost coming out of their paycheck. These are starting to get big numbers. As we've come out of COVID these have not slowed down. Now, next up is the high deductible health plan. So, I'm going to kind of walk you through the same type of data, and we'll do some comparisons against the copays when we finish. So, on the high deductible plan, so these, for these, a lot of people associate high deductible health plans with HSA, which is health savings accounts. These plans do not have copays, right? So, to make high deductible plans HSA qualified, they cannot have first-dollar benefits. So, this is where the member is going to pay the deductible, and then once they meet the deductible, they'll be in coinsurance, maximum out-of-pocket. But if there's a deductible before copays, it can be an HSA-qualified plan. The PEO's got 3 high deductible plans. You can see the benchmarks, same color code. In the regional side, you're looking about $3,500 is a benchmark on high deductible, deductible. And then you've got the national and small group slightly under that, about $3,300. We got 3 plans, gold to bronze. These are regulated somewhat. When they're HSA qualified, the IRS each year stipulates how much the deductible has to be to get these HSA qualified. So, most plans do tweak this every year to keep them HSA-qualified. So, that's what you're looking at. So, HSA is about, you know, $300 benchmark. Coinsurance, 20% across the board. Notice these for Guru, they're zero coinsurance because the carrier pays 100% after the deductible. So, basically, the maximum out-of-pocket and deductible are the same. So, once you meet the deductible, you're also meeting the out-of-pocket maximum. Therefore, there's no coinsurance. The out-of-pocket maximum, again, back to the big number we talked about, worst-case scenario, the HSA plans, if you remember, $5,000 was PPO. On high deductible, it's more like $6,000, $6,500, where you're looking at depending on the benchmark. The Gold crushes the benchmark. This is a really, really good plan when the maximum out-of-pocket is just over $3,000. The Silver at $5,000, and then the Bronze at $7,000. So, a little bit higher maximum out-of-pocket on high deductible plans, but this, this is important. Important on this slide, because when you have those plans, remember, no copays. They're your members going to the doctor, they don't have a $25 copay, they may get a $125 bill, $150 bill that they've got to come up with that $150 cash versus a copay. So HSA funding is something that typically will be bundled with a high deductible, where the employer is going to say, hey, we're going to do an HSA plan and we're going to fund it for you, we're going to give you this money. These are the benchmarks. So If you want to be competitive for employee-owned regionals, you're looking at $1,000. And actually, this should be $750. This is a— uh, Beatty, I apologize on that. So $750 on the HSA funding is going to get you right at the benchmark. The $1,000 is actually on the family side. So I'll make that correction here. So basically, you're going to give the employee $750 annually. That's on a 12-month period. And they're going to be able to use that money for medical expenses or What HSA was meant for is to save that money. And the goal would be this, for HSA, if you can do it, save the money until you get to be retirement, 65, and you've got a nest egg of money saved up. And Beatty, I think personally, HSAs are better than 401s. And I'll tell you why.

How so?

Because you're going to be able to deduct the money tax-free. You're going to be able to invest the money within the HSA, and your investment is going to earn money tax-free, and then you're going to be able to withdraw it, and if you use it for qualified medical, you're going to withdraw it tax-free. Right? So, 401 is basically the same, but when you withdraw it, you're going to pay taxes. In this, you're going to be able to withdraw it, pay medical bills tax-free. So, it's kind of a triple threat. So, high deductible plans, I'm a huge fan of. HSAs, I'm a huge fan of, and if you can save that HSA money and not burn it every year $1,000 a year, save it, invest it. That could be a huge nest egg for you at retirement.

I couldn't agree more. That's why I max mine out every year.

Every year. It's great. Next piece on plan cost, employee-only average. You notice the copay plans were well over $700. High deductible plans a little bit cheaper because you're not paying copays. Deductibles a little bit higher. $605 national. $597 regional, $579 small group. And then the cost percentages here for employers, they're kicking in a little bit more. If you notice on the PPO, there's in the 70% range, we're up to 80% on high deductible. Again, employers are trying to incentivize members to say, "Hey, high deductible is a good idea. I'm going to contribute a little bit more." These plans cost less. They lower the cost for employee members by kicking in 80-81% on the contribution. The family monthly premium, these are under $2,000. Remember, the PPO is well over. $1,895, so you're looking about $1,800 on the family high deductible plan. Notice here, as we saw on the copay, employer percentages much less, ranging from 58% to 66%. Of the contribution for family. You can definitely see employers as a whole are contributing much more to the employee-only tier, much less to the family from a percentage standpoint. There's so many spouses that are working in the workforce today. A lot of the employers are saying, hey, for family coverage, we're not gonna contribute a crazy amount because we'd rather have those spouses, if you're working at another company, we would have that spouse join that other company's health plan rather than ours. Does that make sense? What kind of that strategy?

It does to me, Matt.

So, that kind of wraps up the two big programs that are out there from a copay plan, high deductible. Hopefully, these benchmarks are going to help everyone once you look at the data, compare it to where you are, and go through renewals, help come up with some good contribution strategies for your employees and meet budget as well. The next up is going to be dental and vision. Second most popular is going to be dental. Most employers offer a dental and vision program. So I want to take a minute to go through that. On dental deductible, it's pretty standard, hasn't changed a lot over the last 10 years. $50 is a benchmark deductible. Guru offers 2 plans to members, a low plan and a high plan. Both have that $50 minimum. To the right of that is where you'll start seeing a differentiator. In the two plans. The low plan for Guru's PEO is $1,000 benefit max, which is much less than the benchmark. Benchmark's about $1,500. So that means it's less rich. But the high plan is going to be even better than benchmark. So Guru's giving members a choice. Do you want a cheaper plan with a little less benefit, or do you want a more expensive plan with a lot more benefit? We are starting to see these benefit max annual amounts start creeping up on dental. As dental costs are going up, these benchmarks are going up. This benchmark used to be $1,000. Now it's at $1,500. The, the 3 major service categories on dental is preventative. Definitely want everybody going to get at least 1 preventative a year. That's 100% benchmark, and the plan pays for those. So find an in-network dentist. Go get your teeth cleaned. It definitely can lower the cost of healthcare, keep you healthy for your lifetime.

You know, just floss, people. Like, I mean, why have people got such a problem with flossing, man? I don't understand. I'm like addicted to— I floss 2, 3, 4, 5 times a day, Matt. Like, I'm addicted to flossing.

It is. That is definitely on the OCD realm. Hey. Without a doubt. But you've got nice teeth and you probably are not getting basic services or major services. But if you were, the benchmark for plans to pay 80% of those basic and pay 50% of the major services, major being root canals, some pretty severe things going on. What's basic? So basic is going to be cavities, things of that nature. So it's kind of the first step when you're, if you're not flossing and not brushing, not getting your teeth clean, you're going to get that cavity. It's going to be a basic service, but then those cavities can turn into root canals, which you end up in major services. So this is going to cost the member money because The benchmark says they're only going to pay 50%, so who's going to pay the other 50%? Well, you are. So the preventative route is the way to go on dental. Ortho, orthodontic, getting your braces done. Typically this is for— going to be for teenagers and below. Most plans don't cover adult orthodontic, but on the right-hand side, the Ortho Max, you're looking at nationally about $1,500. Typically that's a lifetime max as well. Small and regional, about $1,200. The low plan for Guru, we don't offer ortho, but the high plan we do. We got a $1,000 max. This is something we evaluate every year and looking at the things like the Orthomax used to be in that $1,000 range and now it's continued to creep up. So this will be something we continue to look at on an annual basis. You can see at the bottom, ortho prevalence, I kind of showed most are going to this green where the child only. Don't be surprised if that's what we're— you see more and more often. The adult ortho is just really becoming less and less popular. There we go. All right, plan costs. We've got employee premium. The benchmark is now approaching almost $40 for employee only per month. I mean, you run the math on that, and that's, you know, getting close to pushing $500, $600 a year for employee premium. So, the dental costs we have, these are— we're starting to see some inflation on the dental side without a doubt since pre-COVID. The Guru rates are really strong at $29 and $39, the low plan and high plan. But we do expect these benchmarks to keep creeping up. You see on the right, family premium, well over $120 now for a monthly premium. Low plan at $96 for guru and $131 for family. I've got the breakdown for you. When you're looking at your contribution strategy, how much should you pay as an employer? Well, these blue percentages are gonna give you that. So, in the region, 35% is the employer contribution. Nationally is 56%, small group 62%. So, we're really kind of lagging behind in the region. From a benchmarking standpoint when you're looking at total premium. On the family side, as the medical did, employers are contributing a less percentage: 34% nationally, 20% regionally, and 27% for small group. I'll spend a minute here on vision. These really have been fairly standard. We're starting to see a little bit on the frames allowance creep up, but exam copays, top left, $10 copays standard across the board, and The actual Guru plan is right at that $10, so that's pretty standard. Materials copay, $25, standard, really hasn't changed in 10 years. Contact allowance, starting to see that creep up a little bit. Guru's on the high end of that. All groups close to that $150 range. National and regional, it's more like $130. Now, frames allowance starting to go up. Most of those frames are manufactured in China. Guru's got a good, good plan for that. That allowance is about $130 too. All right, any questions on dental and vision, Batey?

I do have a question. So we saw the percentage that people on average contribute. Do you have any data as far as what percentage of employers contribute versus make it voluntary?

Well, yeah, so that, that's a good question. So the, no, you know, you're right with the median here. So it like, for example, when we look at this, 56% is what employers are kicking in. So the half of the companies out there. Pay less than $56 and that can go all the way down to zero. And then half or more than $56, they pay $60 to $80. So majority of companies do kick in for dental for sure. But I couldn't tell you how many are voluntary completely at 0%. I could run that on our book, but off the top of my head, I don't know.

Just throwing you some curveballs, you know, keep you on your toes a little bit.

Yeah. Dental definitely is a, you want your employees doing preventative. The dental piece is important. I would say the percentage is going to be single digits, teens voluntary. When you get to vision, vision is going to be probably over 50% or all voluntary. So dental and vision are kind of opposite. Most companies will kick in money for dental. Most do not for vision. Makes sense. A couple other benefits here that are important. Employer-paid basic life. Huge, huge here on the majority, flat dollar amount, basic life. Guru offers $25,000 and $50,000. And those are, I'd say $50,000 is probably the most popular by far. You can see the others here. Some companies do 1x salary, 2x salary, but majority is a flat dollar amount that each full-time employee is going to receive. And that is company paid. Short-term disability, 77% of all companies are in that in the short-term disability that pays 60% of salary. The benefit duration that you're going to get 60%, the highest is going to be at 13 weeks. So most companies offer short-term disability that'll pay out for 13 weeks. The second most popular is 30, 30% offer 26 weeks. Guru Plan does actually 24 weeks. You have 2 weeks of vacation or a waiting period, which equals the 26. So it's basically the same thing. Their short-term is basically on the, just 20%. 26-week, 30% category. The short-term disability, you could probably guess what's the number 1 short-term disability claim. Maternity.

Maternity leave.

Maternity. And then MSK, which is going to be your back. Back's going to be number 2, where somebody's kind of hurt their back, tweaked their back, can't quite get around to work. So they're going to go out on short-term disability. So those are the 2 there. So you want to have short-term disability. It's sometimes employer paid, sometimes voluntary. It kind of depends. Long-term disability, you want that to be gapless to where once short-term ends, long-term can kick in if an employee needs it. So you're gonna see here a vast majority, 87% of all companies offer a 60% benefit. So they're gonna get 60% of their pay for long-term disability. So as short-term ends, that 26% week period ends, then they roll into long-term disability and it starts paying out. So most companies are the 60%, and that's not even close. The elimination period and duration, it typically goes to age 67. So the duration of long-term is going to go to your retirement, right? So that's age 67. So if you're 26 and go out on short-term disability and long-term disability, most plans are going to pay that that person out until they're on Social Security Disability. All right, so the biggest thing for short-term and long-term, make it gapless. Make sure your short-term runs long enough to meet your long-term disability benefit, and then you're typically good to go. Prevalence of other benefits, you can see here, over half of all companies offer all of these. You got PTO time, that's pretty standard. APs are very big as well at 84.4%. Vision, 84.7%. Basic life, 78%. Offer that. The PEO, from Guru's standpoint, giving you all these benefits under one package where you can go to one place and get everything. As a small business owner, it's very nice to be able to give competitive benefits to your members at being a 10, 20, 30, 40 employee company when you're, when you're having to fight Fortune 500 companies for talent. Hopefully what this data means, we talked about it at the very beginning, to validate your strategy. Are you— do you want to be average? And that's right at that benchmark. Do you want to be better than most? You want to be better than the benchmark. So, what this data is validating is validating your strategy. Is it where you want it to be? And if it's not, the Guru Plan is going to renew in July. That will be the time to change plan designs. Look at your contribution strategy. See where you need to make tweaks to align your strategy with the benefit offerings. And hopefully you've taken some notes and some of the data here and benchmarks. You can feel really confident of sharing some of these benchmarks with your employees, letting them know, hey, we're paying 80% of the benefit. The total premium is X, you're only having to pay this much and we're paying the other part. Hopefully this was able to validate from a benefit standpoint. I'll stop there, see if any of you have any comments or other questions. But I think we've got—

if you have any questions or comments, throw them in the chat. But yeah, like I alluded to earlier, I mean, it's the number one question. Hey, why do my rates go up? Why are my rates higher than they were at this other company or whatever? And it's like, typically it has to deal with the health of the group, right? Like we always say, you can't outrun an unhealthy group. But Blue had this magical piece of wisdom they gave to Matt at a conference recently that I thought was, you know, it's kind of similar to when people ask me, hey man, you're 46 years old. You managed to keep yourself in in shape and you, you know, even though you're busy, you own and operate a business, you have kids and you're active with other things. Like what was that wisdom, Matt, that they gave you to help make sure that your group performs well?

Yeah, it's really two things. Two things, babe. Two things. You got to eat right and exercise, right? Eat right, exercise. You got to—

Let me write that down.

Really, there's not going to be, there's not going to be a pill. There's not going to be AI. Or a doctor or a health system that's, you know, they're there to fix things after they've happened. We've got to take ownership, and I'm talking to myself, my kids, everybody else, everybody's hearing this, we all have to be accountable and take ownership and do everything we can to eat right and exercise. You know, we try to overcomplicate it, but if we all did that, we're gonna be much better off. Now, obviously there's things going on with people, and I'm gonna walk through some of those, But there are some controllable items that we've got to take ownership of. And some of the health conditions that, you know, you're born with some issues going on. Hey, that healthcare, they need to take care of that and insurance needs to take care of that. And there's things that happen with car accidents and things that happen that are out of our control and we need healthcare to take care of that. But we've got to do our part and we've got to be fit and healthy as part of the equation. So, I'm going to show you here, I've got a few slides here to give people a little bit of insight into just some monster claims that a lot of these are uncontrollable where health insurance is needed, right? So, if you look at this first one, this is some Sun Life data on the top 20 high-cost claim conditions. And you can see in 2024, the number 1 was cancer, malignant neoplasm. So, cancer, Sun Life has paid out almost half a billion dollars on cancer claims. Cardiovascular was number 2 at $173 million. And you can see the claim counts there too. They're, they're huge, right? So, you can just see that leukemia down here, newborn infant. This is going to be a theme that goes through. Let me show you the next piece that shows you the top 20 high-cost claim conditions. So, average cost. This will give you a little bit. So, a newborn infant care. This is going to be a preemie baby situation. Average, $500,000. Highest cost was $7.2 million. Right? So, a preemie baby is gonna— you're gonna be half a million to a million like that when you go in the NICU. So, those are very tough situations for sure. Hemophilia, blood disorders, average $400,000, the highest $3.6 million. So, the highest claim was $3.6 million, but on average about $400,000. The third one here, these are birth defects, you know, $300,000. And then we start hitting the cancers where you're— see, leukemia, your plan is going to be paying about $300,000. $500,000. So, when these type of situations are going on, and you've got a $5,000 maximum out-of-pocket, and you're like, okay, they're treating me, and it's spending $500,000. I'm at $5,000. When you start looking at those numbers, and your healthcare is capped at that number, you know, that, that is working. It's painful, but it is working in these situations. So, these are the numbers that's scaring the carriers, the insurance companies. It's this type of stuff that's really driving healthcare costs, not necessarily strep throat, ear infections, and those type things. The drugs, to give people a little bit of perspective here on some of the drugs that are out there in the marketplace, this is Keytruda, average cost $158,000. This is an injection. 8 out of 10 of these are on cancer. So 8 out of 10 are cancer. These outside of this number 8, $31,000, these are all 6-figure injectable drugs that are happening typically in the hospital. So you can see the millions of dollars that were paid out. So cancer, everybody has been affected with cancer, even themselves, or they've got a family member or friends. It is out there. It's definitely a driver for cost for sure. You've got, I've got a couple here and I'll wrap up. Conditions with the highest number of million-dollar claims by year. These numbers, the million-dollar claimants used to be, 30 years ago there weren't any. Now there's a lot of million-dollar claims per year. So in 2024, the rank, you can kind of see I put them in order here from '21 to '24. Cancer is number 1, leukemia, cancer number 2 as well, and then newborns, preemie babies, I'll be 3, and cardiovascular. So you can kind of see here, when these hit on the carrier side, insurance companies, they're definitely hitting freakout mode for sure because they're going to be treated, but they're going to come with a huge price tag. As you guys just saw with those cost of drugs and care, it easily gets in the 6-figure range. The last slide I'll show you, $3 million claims. We kind of went through the million, but I mean, $3 million claimants, birth defects. There's a lot of drugs coming out on the market. Now, they're doing some fantastic things, vady. So, if you had a child that needed this high-cost drug, you're not batting an eye, give it to them. So, and they're doing some great things. Like, there's one that helps cure blindness in children, but it's got a multimillion-dollar price tag. So, So there's multiple things out there that can hit a plan for over $3 million at this point, and it's not necessarily slowing down. So we've got to do our part, eat right, exercise, staying healthy so that insurance can do its job and take care of the things that aren't controllable. Because those folks that are having situations that's out of their control, they need the help, and then we can do our part where we can.

That's fantastic, Matt. And again, if anybody has any questions, go ahead and throw them in the chat. This has been really educational, really informative, helped me certainly as an employer to understand again where we fit as far as, you know, we are— I often joke, I don't know how many people are on the call old enough to remember, you know, not only am I the HairClub president, I'm also a client. But, you know, not only am I, you know, the, the CEO of Guru as the PEO where we offer this other employers, but I also have to decide what are we going to do for our employees, what is our contribution going to be, and, you know, what percentage of that and what total dollar amount are we going to contribute. And this is always incredibly valuable to me as I make those decisions. So thank you for providing this tremendous information. And if we didn't reference it earlier, it is from Milliman, who is the premium data provider as it relates to this benchmark study. And you can research and find them online to, to get a sense of where this data comes from. And we'll put some links in the show notes for those of you watching this after the fact. But Matt, any parting words of wisdom for the people before we cut it loose today?

Yeah, data is powerful. So if you— if you're first time looking at benchmarks, this is something we do annually. Guru is a big sponsor of this to give the platform. So take the data, help inform yourself and make really good decisions based on this information.

Excellent. Thank you so much, sir. Appreciate your time and thank y'all for joining us today. God bless.