About
The employer benefits industry is broken in specific, nameable ways. Reinventing Benefits exists to name them — and to spotlight the people figuring out how to fix them.
Why this site exists
If you manage healthcare benefits for an employer, you already know the landscape:
- Big consulting firms publish paywalled research that reads like committee-written white papers
- Vendor marketing blogs are thinly disguised product pitches
- Trade press reports the news without forming opinions
- Podcasts run mostly interview formats with softball questions
What's missing is an independent practitioner voice — someone in benefits conversations every day, writing from the employer-buyer side of the table, with opinions grounded in what's actually happening in the market.
That's what Reinventing Benefits is building.
What we cover
Our content is organized around six pillars — the themes that matter most to benefits leaders right now:
Data Transparency & Employer Rights
The benefits industry runs on information asymmetry. The law says that era is over. Most employers don't know it yet. We cover CAA Section 201, ERISA fiduciary duty, carrier data access fights, and what employers can actually do about it.
The Point Solution Paradox
Employers keep buying great programs. Employees keep not using them. Somewhere between "we invested in this" and "nobody knows it exists" is a $1–3M gap. We dig into why utilization stays stuck at 3–8% and what changes the math.
Healthcare Economics
Medical trend is up 10–15% again. The responses haven't changed in a decade. We cover the math that CFOs care about — high-cost claimant concentration, self-funding economics, GLP-1 costs, and why plan design changes shift costs without reducing them.
Carrier Conflicts & the Trust Deficit
Carriers make money when healthcare costs go up. Employers need them to go down. That's not a technology problem — it's an incentives problem. We write about economic misalignment, "free" carrier platforms, navigation bias, and the independence question.
What's Actually Working
Amid all the dysfunction, some employers are getting it right. On-site clinics, centers of excellence, advanced primary care, navigation done right — we cover what high-performing benefits programs actually look like.
The Human Side
Behind every medical trend number is someone trying to get care for their kid, their parent, or themselves. We cover health equity, the front-line worker problem, benefits as talent strategy, and why this work matters beyond the spreadsheet.
Who this is for
Reinventing Benefits is written for benefits leaders, HR executives, CFOs, and consultants — the people making decisions about how employers manage healthcare for their people. If you're responsible for a benefits program from mid-market through jumbo, this is your conversation.
Have a story, a question, or a strong disagreement? That's what this is for.