Stop Chasing Health Insurance Renewals ~ Start Building The Solution

Most benefits conversations start with the renewal. I want to start somewhere else: the moment an employee actually needs care and has to figure out where to go, who to call, and how long they’ll wait. That is the “front door” to healthcare, and if it’s broken, no amount of clever insurance math fixes the experience.

On a trip to Springfield, Missouri, I spot something that stops me in my tracks: a building tied to Bass Pro Shops offering primary care and urgent care. When I look closer, it’s a dedicated clinic built for covered employees and their families with primary care, preventive care, chronic condition management, health coaching, a pharmacy, and virtual care. It’s a clear signal that some employers are shifting their benefits strategy from healthcare financing to healthcare access.

From there, I lay out two routes. Route One is what most people live with today: weeks to get in, scattered providers, hard care coordination, and bills that show up months later. Route Two starts with an accessible primary care relationship where someone knows your name, you can get same-day appointments, visits are long enough to matter, and you get navigation when specialty care is needed. That is how we move from an emergency response system to a health maintenance system.

If you’re an employer, HR leader, or benefits decision-maker, this is an invitation to think like a healthcare architect and ask what path you’re putting your people on. Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with your biggest healthcare pain point so we can tackle it next.

Music by Alex Lambert.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Welcome to another Tuesday morning with Justin. I'm Justin Futrell, Benefit Advisor at True North. And today I'm fired up. I have been on so many phone calls in the last week thinking about how we create this new front door. And I want to give you one piece of context before I dive in today.

Why A New Healthcare Front Door

SPEAKER_00 0:36

The this conversation, last week's episode, was really launched by a client asking, Justin, I don't want another healthcare band-aid. If you could recreate the ideal healthcare system from scratch, what would it look like? What if we started over? That's what I'm talking about. Those are the questions we need to be asking. So let me give you a quick side story as we transition into this. A few months ago, I was in Springfield, Missouri, getting ready to speak at the annual Sherm Conference. I was out in the morning on a run before the speaking engagement. And I thought coming from Denver, I'd be in great shape

A Bass Pro Clinic Surprise

SPEAKER_00 1:17

coming from altitude, but it was tough. I remember it. But one thing happened on the run. I was running by Bass Pro Shops, the headquarters. Beautiful trail, ponds, etc. And I noticed across the street there was a big building that said Bass Pro Shop, primary care and urgent care. And I thought, well, that's pretty neat to have accessible care so close for all these employees. So I looked on the website and it says it's a dedicated clinic offering primary care, preventative care, management of chronic conditions, health coaching, a pharmacy, and even virtual care for covered employees and their families. Bass Pro has partnered with a local health provider to create what they describe as a convenient front door to health care for employees and dependents. Hmm. Okay. When most employers think about healthcare, I think they think about insurance. But the best innovative employers are the ones who are starting to think differently. They're asking, what if we invested in healthcare access

Access Versus Insurance Thinking

SPEAKER_00 2:25

instead of just healthcare financing and how to deal with a renewal? Because in reality, it's insurance doesn't deliver healthcare. Doctors do, nurses do, clinics do. So that leads me to thinking about this visually as two different routes, right? We have Route One. We're all familiar with what Route One looks like. Think about it as a road. It's the traditional healthcare journey. You get sick, you spend weeks trying to find a follow-up appointment if you need a specialist, you bounce between providers and billing

Route One Versus Route Two

SPEAKER_00 3:02

offices, you might get surprise bills maybe 300 days later. Coordination of care is usually hard. And basically, it's the path most Americans are on today, and it's frustrating for most people. But there's another road. What if we build a Route Two? Route two begins with an accessible primary care relationship like Bass Pro having on-site care, a physician who knows your name, same-day appointments, longer visits, preventative care, navigation. What does that look like? To me, it looks like we created the new front door. Instead of treating health care like an emergency response system, you're building a health maintenance system. So maybe the question for employers isn't how do we negotiate a better renewal? Maybe the question is what path are we asking our employees to follow? Now, that's not the entire solution, right? That's just one piece of it. The first door. So where does that leave us? The next question that I wonder is what happens if they need to go into another door? What if they need to see a specialist? What if primary care isn't enough? Regardless, the lesson from Bass Pro isn't that every company should build a clinic on site. For

When Primary Care Is Not Enough

SPEAKER_00 4:24

some, it might make a heck of a lot of sense. The takeaway is that the best employers are starting to think like healthcare architects, not just healthcare purchasers. And by the way, we've got two doctors who are willing to come on site twice a week for four hours a day for this client that we're starting to solve this problem for. Oh, I can't wait to see what's next. Thanks for listening. Come back next week.