Search Data From Brokers Highlights Most Popular Benefits

Pet insurance, pet care, you know, paternity leave. These are actual things. And it is a regularly, highly searched category on Benefit Patch. And as I mentioned, cracks me up every time. People love their fur babies. There was a company that I talked to that's in the backup care space. And they said, you know, X percentage of the backup care requests that they get are for pets, not even children, which just floored me. But that is absolutely a, like, kind of mind blower, which has really raised the eyebrow every time I look at services. Welcome to the Wellable Weekly Podcast. I usually open up saying we will discuss a topic around the intersection of technology, health and well-being. I always say, you know, I introduce my colleague, Jeff. But this is a very unique episode where we're not going to focus on a single article. And we're going to, for the first time ever, have our first guest on the podcast. Our guest is Dave Kerrigan. I think many of you may already know him. His reputation precedes him. Dave, how's it going? I'm doing great, Nick. How are you doing? Not too bad. It's another cold day in Boston. We got a little bit of a tease last week. We're in the 70s. People were walking around in shorts, acting like they've never seen sun before. But I think we're back into cold weather. I think down to the 20s again next week. Nick, recall that I'm just north of Boston. And on Thursday morning, I wore shorts when I went running. Oh, wow. Okay. So we're preaching to the choir here. So for those people who don't know Dave, right? He's the CEO and founder of Benefit Pitch. And I think what Benefit Pitch does is really important to what we're going to talk about because it gives him and his company access to data that's really informative in the industry that we operate in. And so, in short, my spiel about Benefit Pitch is that it allows vendors like Wellable and all these other companies, I think you have over 1,000 vendors on your platform today, to create profiles and allows brokers and benefit professionals, over 20,000 of them currently use your platform, to use Benefit Pitch to identify the proper and appropriate resources and navigate the various options on behalf of their employers. Is that a fair description? Pretty fair description, yeah. I'd say that the only thing that's a little different is that for our Benefit Professional users, we built like a vendor management system around it. And so, as a former broker myself, it's a really hard thing to know all of the vendors that are out there. And now, using a system like Benefit Pitch, it's a lot more easy or a lot easier for a Benefit broker, Benefit consultant to search a category, find them, learn if they're pre-approved or have passed security protocols. For their, you know, brokerage firms, IT department, things like that. It just makes it a little easier for everybody to come together and, you know, get to know one another. For brokers to find vendors and solutions and for the solutions to get found. Awesome. One of the things I love about your report, which I'll talk about a bit, and by the way, I have like a little cheat sheet here. So, something you post on LinkedIn, which is, when I saw it, by the way, I was just kind of on LinkedIn for something random. I saw your LinkedIn post about this thing we'll talk about. So, I'm just teasing it a little bit. And I was like, this is the first guest. This is the home run for the podcast you want to do. And I love the report for two reasons. One is, it's a very data-driven way to identify hot or interesting topics as it relates to like our Benefit space. And then two, you did a super creative thing because I think you released it right around the Super Bowl. So, the whole theme of the report is like Super Bowl related. It's hard to describe because like every description has like, you know, on the gridiron and like little Super Bowl or football references. So, I'm not doing it justice, but it's really, really well done. So, kudos to you and your team. For everyone else, we're going to obviously cover kind of high-level points on it. But in our show notes, we're going to put a link, download the resource, the whole thing. We can't cover everything. It's just too long. It's 100% worth doing. And I think you'll have at the very least some entertainment value from the Super Bowl references. Well, Kelsey and Arthur on my marketing team do an amazing job pulling this stuff together along with Susan, Maria, the rest of the crew. I can't even take credit. They ask me, which theme do you want to do? And then they have me review the final product. That's about it. So, I basically start and end, but they do all of the work in the middle. And this is the first of many of these reports that we've done. And they're always designed to be very informative and fun because if you can't have a little bit of fun in our industry, I think we're doing it wrong. That is true. And kudos to the team. So, like I said, I have this report. And effectively, it's the top search terms in the benefit portal, right? So, these 20,000 benefit professionals or the benefit pitch portal, excuse me, are here. These professionals are there. They're searching because they have a client come in and say, hey, I'm interested in the EAP solutions. They can use your platform to find that. And by virtue of the frequency of these searches, you get a sense of, like, what's popular or what's not, what's increasing momentum, what's decreasing. Maybe before we get into the actual data, any kind of context for, like, how this report is compiled and the data related to it? Yeah, I think it's helpful to understand how the report and how the users all come together. As I mentioned, the benefit pitch site is kind of a marketplace for the vendors, like Wellable and others, to create a really in-depth profile full of all of their contact information, their sales folks, their products and services, pricing, group size they serve, any pertinent information that an employer or benefit broker consultant might need. And then, as I mentioned, we're licensing it to benefit firms as a vendor management system, and they roll it out nationally across the United States to all offices. So there's 20,000-plus benefit professionals that are doing, on average, 8,500 searches a month for all sorts of categories. We've pre-created 400-plus categories, and the vendors and solutions that create profiles can select a handful of those to describe their products and services. So that's kind of the way that the system works, and then we aggregate all of the search data across a certain time period. We can do quarterly, monthly, weekly, by year, comparison year over year, things like that. The report that we're going to be discussing today is the search data on 2025 searches that we released just around that Super Bowl timeframe with the Super Bowl theme. 400 categories, I think that's a great way just to crystallize how broad the HR benefit space is, right? So, you know, you think you're an HR generalist. Yeah, well, I'm considering 400 different categories at any given time about the benefits I want to offer. It just gives you a sense of the amount of overwhelm that could happen being in that position. So, well, let's dive into it. So, I mean, you live this world. I'm sure you look at this data all the time. For someone like me, I'm seeing the data for the first time. What is something that just struck you as like, oh, that's interesting or that's unique? Yeah. Well, I'll frame it this way. A lot of people hear and know what they think is the most highest searched regular thing. Yeah, there are things that are a little bit sizzle right now. There are things that are like, oh, everyone's talking about it. It can be ICHRIS. It can be GLP-1s. It can be, you know, genomic therapy. It can be AI. You've got to understand that the users of the platform, these benefit brokers, consultants, and HR folks, they've got a day-to-day job and there's a lot of day-to-day stuff that happens that they need to address. So, I'm always a little surprised at certain things. So, one is regular services that are kind of mainstays in the space regularly get searched. And I'll hit on these each one at a time. The second kind of area is the ones that they're not that surprising. You expect them to be there and they're there. And then the third is the ones that kind of make you chuckle or raise your eyebrow going, really? That one's a top searched, right? So, I'll go in reverse order. This one cracks me up every time. Pet services, pet insurance, pet care, you know, paternity leave. But that is absolutely a, like, kind of mind blower, which has really raised the eyebrow every time I look. Pet services. It's funny, I think I don't quote me on this, but I think pet services hopped into the top 10 search for your data analytics in 2024. I forget what it was ranked, but then it jumped to look at this sheet down to the fourth spot, right? So, you know, all the core benefits that people are, like, looking into, and the fact that this is the fourth most common search category blows my mind. And, like, not surprisingly, I think, like, last week I was just, like, going through, like, whatever my normal news feed stuff. And I saw an article, I didn't read it, but I said the headline was effectively, like, pet grooming is a boom market right now. It's, like, growing double-digit percentages throughout the country. People are creating both, like, bespoke boutique pet grooming services, and there are all these huge pet grooming behemoths that are arising throughout the nation as well. Yeah, it's a bit of a mind blower. You could say that it was powered by COVID because I think a lot of people, you know, you're locked down, you're not going anywhere. People got pets, got them for their kids. I can tell you that, you know, my daughters wanted guinea, sorry, they wanted dogs, and we got guinea pigs. It's, uh, It's a different kind of a situation for everybody, but pets are, you know, they're our fur babies. People love them. People want to take good care of them. And disposable income is spent on pets, pet services, pet insurance, pet grooming. So, yeah, this is one where employers and brokers and consultants who are kind of paying attention, you're going to see certain right fit employers for every category of a benefit. But I'd have to say that that is one of those, it's almost cut into that kind of must-have territory, which is if you're trying to attract and retain talent, it's not a cost-saving thing. So you're not going to save money on your premium or your self-funded plan by putting in pet insurance or pet services. But people who are looking for jobs who have pets, they're going to be asking that question. For sure, I guess if I now just thinking about it for the first time, if I ran a pet services business and I was trying to justify the ROI on pet services, it has to either be retention or recruitment. Like, people want this stuff and, like, you want to get the best talent. Or by virtue of maybe giving you, like, doggy daycare or something, you're able to work or focus. And, like, there's productivity benefits by not having to run back home to go walk the dog or whatever it may be. It's funny. When I saw pet services and then the number three spot was financial tax advantage counts, like FSA, HSA, HRA, what I thought was, like, it kind of reminded me of this, like, concept that people are talking about, like, online, like the K-shaped economy, where, like, certain people are doing really, really well in this economy. And another group of people are not doing so well because pet services is, like, quintessential disposable income. I have an extra mouth to feed. Things are going really, really well for me. And I can pay someone to groom my pet. I don't have to do it myself on the weekend or whatever. Or that's really important where, like, the rise of these accounts, which are, you know, more traditional. They've been around for decades. Most employers have them. There's not much – I don't want to say this because I'm sure everyone has an opinion, but huge amounts of differentiation for an HSA. It's, like, a very regulated account that needs to hit certain, like, regulatory requirements. But the fact that it's still being served so much kind of makes me think that it's tied to the economy to a certain degree. And there's a financial well-being component where employers are thinking we need to find a way to improve the financial health of our employees without maybe paying them more. Yeah. That's my only assumption for why that's ranked so high. Well, there's two sides of that coin that I'll take. So, the first, when you – when you think about the generations that are in the workforce – I mean, I'll out myself. I'm north of 50. I'm a Gen Xer. And there's certain ways that I grew up doing things, spending money on certain things, not spending money on other things. If you look at somebody who's in their early 20s, I'll say it this way. I don't do, like, Uber Eats and stuff because I look at the service charge for delivery and I'm like, I'll just drive and the gas money is not nearly as much. I'm just going to go pick it up. Even if a younger generation person doesn't have the financial security, you know, they don't have tons in savings or whatever else, they might be living paycheck to paycheck. Maybe it's a pretty good paycheck, but they're certainly not sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars in their bank account. But they've chosen to spend it on things like pet services, like food delivery and things like that. It's almost a staple of a generation. I think that needs to be paired with things like how do you establish credit? How do you get yourself out of student loan debt? How do you then save for retirement? Which I think is a whole different story for folks that are on the upper end of the spectrum versus entering the workforce. So that's number one. The other side of it is you're spot on. I actually saw an article headline this morning as I was going through my emails that talked about the upcoming midterm elections and how that's going to impact kind of the fate of HSAs. And yeah, they're the big, beautiful bill had a lot of favorable pieces for these tax advantage accounts. So, of course, organizations that are trying to stay up on the latest and greatest are looking at this. They're asking their benefit consultants to look at this and continually one of the top search categories on benefit pitch. Yeah. And the other one that kind of also just like a called benefit staple, number one and number two were EAP services. Number two was Cobra. And, you know, I think you make this probably talk about both of them, but if we're going to pick one, I kind of think about Cobra is like that's just a shocker. And then I had to go back to the 2024 data and realize that Cobra was also top of the list there. And I don't know. Maybe I mean, I live in a bubble, but I'm thinking like every company has a Cobra vendor. It's kind of a plain vanilla service. Yes, I think no question could be better. I could speak on behalf of like our Cobra vendor. I wish their technology was better, like to enter the information and sync up with things. It's not great, but like does the tricks. I'm kind of shocked that so many brokers presumably are being asked by their clients, these employers, to think about a new Cobra vendor. I wonder if there's a big cycle shift happening that maybe I'm just not aware of. Yeah, when I kind of opened this and said there was the three categories and I went one, two, three, and three was the pet services category and I was going in reverse. Number two is the ones that you would expect to see there. And I think that EAP, behavioral health, even leave management to a certain extent. Those are ones that have been there for a while. They're growing. They should be there. They'll continue to be there. And I'm not that surprised. But Cobra and some of these other categories like benefit administration, third-party administration, ACA compliance and reporting, those were also top 10 in this last report. Those surprised me. And I have, as a former benefit consultant, as a guy who's worked in this space for many, many years, I have to derive a certain conclusion on what's going on here. And the only thing that I can think about is that maybe there's more to be done here. What I mean by that is if you have a solution as a benefit consultant, you put it in place for your client, you're an employer, you put in a certain type of vendor. You know, category agnostic. Pick a category. If they're doing their job and they're doing it well and they're delivering on whatever promise it was, right, you're probably not going to search for that, shop for that every year. Maybe every five years because of a diligence thing, you're going to ask your benefit consultant, hey, could you just look at this category again because it's been a while? And they do a market check and go, everything's pretty much the same. Pricing's pretty good. What you have is a good deal. No need to really do a bid. Maybe you do the bid because it has to be done. It's a good diligence thing or fiduciary responsibility to shop at every three to five years. And the other area that might generate a whole lot of searches is like a new category, like a GLP-1. Or even leave management to that extent isn't a new category, but there's been new technology, new vendors that are offering services. So it's been improved. You know, ICRA is a new category. Lots of searches. COBRA, ACA, Benadmin, TPAs. These are services that have been around for ages. Why are they top 10 continually? And this is what I get to. I think there's more to be done. I don't want to say they're missing the mark, but I will say that maybe this is an area. These are areas that our industry needs a good shot in the arm, a dose of innovation, more technology, AI, however you want to frame or spin that. But there's an opportunity here for the innovators who are out there. Take a look at these categories. Take a look at the existing services. And is it hitting the mark? And I think that you'll see folks say, huh, this is more administratively burdensome than I'd like it to be. Hmm. I think maybe we could improve this if we did X, Y, and Z. And so I think that those are areas that they're being searched because they're ripe for disruption, candidly. And if you're in that category, your opportunity is now to make a change. And if not, you might be getting replaced in the next three to five years by the new up-and-comer. And I wonder what the new up-and-comer, I think, honestly, it's just like a little bit, it's not much to be materially different in that market. It's a lot of, you know, paper mailing and, you know, kind of basic bill processing. But, yeah, it's interesting to see. You know, maybe we have not even considered a new vendor just because it's, like, a staple and it kind of does the trick. But to your point, there's enough folks, like, every five years just being good fiduciaries that take a look. One of the questions I want to say. And, Nick, sorry, before you go any further, just on that note, I feel like even leave management years ago, so leave management's been around for ages. But there's been pushes in, you know, I'll say the political scene. Certain states have different leave management laws. And then you've got local, you've got state, you've got federal. That complexity coupled with a different sort of an economy coupled with COVID. All of a sudden, you've got all of the catalyst pieces in place that some people, some innovators said there's a better way. And then you saw new vendors in these categories come along. And all of a sudden, it became a hotter thing. So I feel like if you're looking at those categories, leave management is leading the way because they had some technology, some new vendors come in, and it caused a spike and a change. And I wonder if that's an opportunity for others. And by the way, COBRA, ACA compliance, maybe not so much ACA compliance, but Ben Admin, TPA services, COBRA services, they're complex. They're not easy. So it's not like. you come in overnight as an innovator and go, I'm going to change this. You really need to understand this industry and how complex it is in order to really make a difference. But I do think there's an opportunity there. I agree. And sometimes it's like UI management. From the user experience perspective, your back office can have all this operation. But from the HR perspective, they're in one portal. And it's by entering information mostly, and then all this stuff can happen. And so you can, just to be a good, healthy, efficient business, you want to always be cleaning that up, right? Minimize errors, make it done quickly, make it done efficiently. But really, from the HR perspective, they're used to just typing stuff in, hitting a button. So that type of like, I don't want to minimize it, but like wrapper can go a long way. Like, oh, this like walks me through the steps. So I'm not confused where to find this document, or how do I enter this information and things? It's interesting. I would say on lead management, I actually understand that intuitively. Like we have offices in DC, Boston, San Diego, so California, Massachusetts. I don't know, it feels like those two states have pretty difficult or more complicated leave laws, all for good reasons. And they're always changing. So even when you think, you know, paid family medical leave in Massachusetts, it's going to change. And so by virtue of that, you can see how a vendor adds a ton of value in wanting to make sure you have the latest and greatest is like really effective, because they're just always shifting markets. One of the questions I always ask about when I see top 10 lists, I go, well, I see a list, but I don't know if like the number one and number 10 are like so close together. They just happen to be apart because you have to rank them, but functionally it's not. Any kind of context you can give us around, you know, EAP services, which is number one. And look at the sheet here, leave management, which is number 10. Just some perspective on like searches and things like that. Yeah. I'll run through some of the top 10 and give kind of a count of the number of searches that might help frame some of this. So EAP was top with over 1600 searches. Cobra was second over 1300 searches. The financial accounts was third, 1200 plus searches dropping below a thousand, but not by much as pet services, behavioral health. But if you drop it down to that kind of 10th spot, it's just North of 650 searches. So it's, it's a spread, but it's, I think that, you know, when you start to look at the percentages, the top three are over a thousand, the next three are over 800 and the next four are over 650. So it's, it's kind of an interesting spread. Yeah. And just as a reminder for the listeners, like context, there's 400 of these categories, right? And there's so much breadth that you can see how that long tail gets pretty long as you go. And one of the, I think the last section or last page or so in your report has like the best of the rust, right? I forget exactly what you called it, but it included the ones that were, wouldn't surprise you if they're actually on the top 10 lists, like health and wellbeing, ICHRAs and things like that. Any commentary on that list that doesn't make the top 10? Was, were you talking about the breakout runs, what we call under, you know, Breakout runs, there we go. Noteworthy services. Yeah. This is one, some of these I don't think are surprising at all, but some of them, it's not that they're surprising. I think maybe it goes into that middle category I mentioned earlier, which is you kind of expect it. So ICHRA, um, I think that there's a reason why that's getting looked at a lot. Cancer care, another one, um, you probably seen the stats that during COVID there was a lot of folks who did not get their regular screening. They were foregoing screenings and you saw this uptick in cancer cases and in, in, in, in younger, uh, younger people too, which is kind of a sad story and sad state of affairs. So there's a lot focused on screening cancer, cancer care services. And for an employer, cancer is a, you know, for so many reasons, a, a really difficult, uh, uh, situation to manage. You've got, you know, a life threatening condition, uh, arguably in some cases, there's going to be a component of, you know, out of the office for it, most likely productivity hit cost hit. And I'm going from the human aspect to the HR and benefits aspect, right? The human aspect is this person might lose their life, which is an incredibly, uh, sad thing to think about. And you start to move down the path of, you know, you're in HR and a CFO person, you know, that can be a very costly condition. Um, of course that was going to be in that kind of breakout category. Caregiving is another one. Um, the light was shined on this also. Again, I keep referencing COVID and believe me, I want to leave that so far in the rear view mirror. That's it was, it was how many years ago, almost like today, this March kind of timeframe that the whole world felt like it shut down and we're trying to put it in a rear view mirror, but this benefits industry, the HR and employers that are out there, uh, HR folks and employers, they're still dealing with this, you know, what happened afterward. Caregiving became a huge issue because folks were forced to work from home. Their kids are not in school. What do you do? Right. And so that then became this thing that got carried forward. Couple that with the generational thing that I mentioned earlier, you've got younger generations that are in the workforce having children. Now there's an expectation for a level of caregiving services, sandwich generation. I'm, I'm one of them. I've got an elderly mother and I've got kids. So now I'm dealing with the two sides of the spectrum. Of course, this one would be in there. The one that kind of makes you kind of go, all right, I get it, uh, is the wellness wellbeing category. This is another one of those, you know, it's not controversial. Wellness and wellbeing has been one of those things where, you know, is there an ROI? Should it should be an ROI or should be, should it be a return on value? Should it be a staple in something that is offered all the time? I think it's become a very mainstream offered benefit for all types of organizations. And there's been probably more of a cost scrutiny on it because if you can't really measure an ROI, arguably some would say you can, I don't know that you really truly can, but return on value and other things. Yes. It becomes one of those must have categories, almost like a pet services. And there are lots of options and there's a lot more technology now than there was in the past. And there's better ways to engage, um, using, you know, new technology and different deliveries of technology. You know, there's, there's mailing things home, which is the old, old school, which still works. And there's, you know, text messaging. And now there's geo-fencing, which is you walk into a store and it's like, if you're shopping for stuff, here are some healthy options. It really gets interesting to see how wellness and wellbeing has evolved. But this one, again, continually in our top 10, 20, 25 regularly searched categories. Yeah. I think, um, it's, it's funny. I mean, I'll speak to wellbeing just cause like that's our, our home base, but it's just, I feel like it has its ebbs and flows. Sometimes to your point, maybe a top 10 and maybe it's like 25, but it never leaves like that, you know, area of interest, um, in this whole ROI, VOI, that's a completely separate podcast that we can go through. Cause it's just, it's hard to measure. There's tons of confounding variables in the, even the most perfect scenario. It's hard to capture what that value is. And like, we know firsthand, we did a study with, uh, Tufts medical here in Boston around a couple of employers here in Boston as part of this federal grant and research program. And like, where they're in the position of like currently submitting the findings to like, uh, publications and time is like asterisk here caveat here, because there's so much like confounding variables, difficulty in measuring certain things that make it almost nearly impossible. And the cost to even come close to measuring it may not even warrant that expense. So it's just this age old problem with that industry. Well, I think, you know, go ahead. Sorry. No, I was going to say in the other, I think it's a challenge or just a reality of how things are. The wellness wellbeing category is enormous, right? You can go as far as like, you know, the Fitbits and technology and wearables to walk-in challenges and incentives to online fitness, you know, in online courses. Uh, you can go as far as to reimbursement. You go as far as there's food and healthy eating. It's an enormous category, enormous. And there's lots of subcategories. This is kind of a roll up in many ways. Um, and like I said, it's not going anywhere, but the scrutiny around it, you know, does it make sense to have three or four different vendors that do this, this, and this, or is there an opportunity for, you know, aggregators and partnerships to come together and offer a more streamlined solution that covers a broad spectrum of services in the wellness and wellbeing space? Yeah. How do you get more for less, right? It's a classic equation. Well, more for less or the, you know, point solution fatigue question. How do you consolidate? So there's fewer contracts, fewer, you know, costs. And, you know, now you've got one neck to choke. Uh, if there's an issue, as they say, I think that there's value in doing that in an economy where HR is still a cost center, not a revenue generating center. And they're still trying to justify the programs that might have a less than stellar engagement. And so CFOs and others are looking at that and they're pressuring HR and the benefit brokers and consultants out there to do more with less. Exactly. Well, as a, one of the things that we were talking about, you know, you're our first guest. So we want to start setting up traditions of like when we have guests on this podcast, what do we do? And one of the, just speaking personally, some of the podcasts I listen to that I really enjoy always have like a way to wrap up the podcast, especially when they have a guest, sometimes like what's your favorite book or what are you reading now and tell us about it, or what's the always love the predictions. I'll always love people, you know, sign their name off in something that they can't undo. It's always there. And then looking back on it and saying, hey, did you achieve it? But I also don't want to set people up for failure, right? And so I want to do a prediction question. I think you're one of the best people to ask that question because of all the data you have. I know we went through it today as this report, but I can only imagine this is just scratching the surface of the data you have access to in terms of like determining your views of the market. So, you know, maybe the question is, let's do two predictions. One like a, let's call it confident prediction. I'm pretty reasonably sure in the next 12 to 24 months, we're going to see this outcome or this thing. And then one that's like a little bit like a contrarian view or a low likely, so low confidence prediction that gives you, you know, something a little bit more meatier or tastier to discuss or talk about. Yeah. Well, I'll start with one and this doesn't count for the two, by the way. I was at a conference and somebody, and this is going to date me. It was back with social media and tweets and tweeting and tweet chats were really a thing. So I was participating in a live one at a conference and somebody said, make a bold prediction. And this was, I don't know, 2015, maybe earlier, probably earlier, 2012, 2013. And I'm not right on this, at least haven't been yet, but I was watching kind of this like sharing of data, younger generations, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Maybe it was actually later, 2017, but whatever it was, I said that HIPAA will be an obsolete law in the next 10 to 15 years. And I don't think I'm winning that bet. But the idea was people were volunteering their data so much more readily. It felt like in younger generations, I thought maybe if you give it time, folks will start selling their data. And if they got paid for it, they could donate it and someone could research it and make good use of it. And as long as it was protected still and all that, maybe HIPAA as a law wouldn't go anywhere. I'm not going to go that bold, but I will go down two paths. So on the more sure one, and these are not groundbreaking, I don't think, but if you're not paying attention to this, I think this is just another person saying this is something to pay attention to. The category of GLP-1s, which everyone is attributing to weight currently, I think you're going to see this expand and blow up in ways that I'm not even sure we are fully appreciating. And all of the, everything that comes with it, right? The cost, the how do you manage the regulatory, everything. But the reach of a GLP-1 and what it can do is not just to curb weight loss and eating, not to curb eating. So there is weight loss. There are other categories that are being tested. So the categories that this will be opened up to from an FDA approval standpoint, things like addiction, and that's all kinds of addiction, right? Smoking addiction, you know, online gambling, all of these other things. And I, I don't think we're fully appreciating just how big of a category this is. I think we're looking at it almost myopically because it's all about weight loss right now. Who are the weight loss of pharmaceutical companies? And is it a forever drug? And it's going to cost me a lot of money. Will it reduce diabetes? I'm like, hold on, that's all important. Pay attention to the long tail of this because it is not going anywhere. And it is going to be a big deal for employers, benefit consultants going forward. Couldn't agree more. I mean, Jeff and I on the podcast, I think the last week or two weeks ago, we had a GLP one episode and it was our first one of the year. And we were shocked that we had gone on a weekly podcast that far. And like in our world, it's still a very big deal. I wonder like in just the general public, like AI is taking up so much of the noise and so much of the attention of everything business news related. But if AI wasn't happening, I think the number one story taking up just as much noise would be GLP ones. I think I've gone somewhere on the record, you know, this was maybe six months ago, 12 months ago, saying in the next 12 or 24 months, that GLP ones would have a bigger true impact, like actual visible impact on our society than AI. Not to say that AI won't have a bigger one further in the future. But you know, you're hearing about airline CEOs talking about reduced fuel spend because of weight loss. You're talking about, to your point, addiction, social media addiction, which is like this, I wouldn't call it hidden crisis, but it kind of feels that way because we're not really trying to address it in a meaningful way. This could be the, you know, out from left field solution to social media addiction and to gambling addiction and to all these other things. I couldn't agree more. I feel like that's a topic that I don't think gets enough attention. Yeah. And I'm not going to get down the AI route, but boy, oh boy. Yeah. Like I said, I'm not going to get down that route, but boy, oh boy. It is, it is a thing. And I think we are, we are in the, we're not in it yet. We are in the very early, is this a thing? And the flood, the wall, like whatever you want to say, it's coming and it is going to fundamentally change everything. That's all I'll say. Well said. The other one you said was kind of a contrarian or an alternate point of view with less likely, I don't know that it's a less likely prediction. I think it might be accurate. I don't know. It is a contrarian point of view. And I'll frame it as this. When you talk about being bullish or bearish on a topic, I fall in the category of a little bit more bearish. And that category is the ICRA, which is the individual consumer health reimbursement arrangement. And it's not that it's not important. It's not going to grow. It is. It's been around. It's going to continue to be around. Law was passed years ago, and it's just slowly been doing this ever since. I don't think it's going anywhere. But what I liken this to, years ago, I worked for the state of Massachusetts Health Connector, public exchange under the Affordable Care Act, running their small group health options program, which was their shop exchange, groups under 50, the brokers that work with them, things like that. I also worked for Buck Consultants, Xerox, back before it was acquired by Gallagher, before they spun off in a conduit, all that lovely stuff, in their private exchange practice. And at this time, which was 2010, 2012, there was, you know, federal ACA law around exchanges and purchasing. And of course, the, you know, the big box houses on the consulting side, and I believe it was Deloitte in this case, made a prediction of the number of lives that were going to be enrolled in exchanges by whatever the date was, 2015, 2014. The number fell way short of the prediction. So the actual number of enrolled versus what was predicted by Deloitte fell way, way, way short. And that did something to the exchange market. I jokingly said that, you know, exchange became a dirty word, when in fact, all an exchange is, is a technologically enabled way to enroll people into an insurance line. It still happens today. So it never went anywhere. I'm giving this background because ICRA feels similar to me. There are folks saying that the numbers that are going to be enrolled in ICRA are going to be way up here. And I'm going, pull that down. The reasons are, I guess, as follows. If you understand insurance, there is this idea of, you know, risk in general. And then there's the, why would people go from a group plan to an ICRA? Let's just say that you and I are both running small businesses and your renewal comes back at 2%, 5%, reasonable. I'm running a small, uh, running a business and my, uh, uh, you know, renewal comes back at 25%, 30, some ridiculous number, which by the way, is what's happening in this market. Not just small group, but we're using small group as an example. Which of us is going to consider an ICRA? The one at a higher premium. Yeah, that's right. You're not, you're going to go. I like the group chassis. It's working for me and my employees. I'm going to keep my people here. Now, fundamentally, why is your renewal better? Now I know we're talking fully insured. It's a large market of people enrolled, but fundamentally your risk is better than my risk. I'm then going to take my risk and put it into an individual exchange where I say to my people, here's money, go shop. And what does that do to that market? It takes bad risk and it floods that market with bad risk. So the more people that move to an ICRA, arguably it's a lot of bad risk. What is that going to do to the risk pool? The employer says, I now have a budgetable expense. I can say, here's your money, go shop for a plan that works for you. There's a lot to like about that. There's choice, there's selection, there's challenges. There's the administrative side for the employer, the broker, the individual, you know, the enrollment side, all of that's tricky. Like there's a lot of challenges with ICRAs that people know about today. I'm talking the broader picture. And the broader picture is that if I'm an employer who's offering a dollar amount and my people are in a risk pool, that is not great. The premium in that risk pool is going to continue to outpace what I'm contributing, which means the individuals are going to have to pay more for their insurance than the employer is giving them. So it is kicking a can down the road where the individual is going to now have to come up with the difference in premium versus what the employer is offering. And I'm not saying that that's not fixable. I mean, this is a longstanding issue insurance in general, right? But I think what it means is a lot of people are going to keep a group chassis and you're not going to see the vast numbers of folks enrolling, enrolling in ICRAs that some pundits have predicted. It's not going anywhere. I'm not saying ICRAs are bad. I'm not saying they're not going anywhere. They'll be around, but I think that that enrollment number needs to be, needs to be gently modified. And I think it's going to be more than people expect. That's fair, right? I don't know the specific predictions. So in the spirit of making this interesting, I'll take maybe the other side, where I completely agree on GLP-1s. It was hard for me. I couldn't genuinely take the other side of that argument. But so, yeah, notwithstanding, I don't know the actual predictions. But I think of every growth market, they always overestimate the opportunity in the short term. In the long term, sometimes they overestimate, sometimes they don't, right? I think like the technology, just take the internet, for example. People overestimate the impact in the short term, but underestimated in the long term. AI, I don't know if that holds for AI because everyone's kind of, a lot of people are doomed saying here. So maybe that's not the case. But in general, we can see how that paradigm works. So what I think is probably true, and both could be true. One, the projections are way out of whack and not grounded in reality. But you still have a really attractive growth market that, for the next X number of years, the number of ICHRA enrollees will increase by 50%, which is a huge growth market for any type of HR benefit. What I think is interesting for a small employer, or the two points we're maybe mentioning, is one, the argument for why you'd want to do it outside the cost. And it's always driven by cost, but there's all this like positioning that you have internally for why it makes sense. It's, well, I am a small employer, I have 40 people, I have a single plan, and that plan works for like 15 people. But there's some people who want a cheaper plan that's like higher deductible or something. And there's a portion of people who want a better plan and are maybe willing to pay for it. And that's just too hard to administer multiple plans for a company that's 40 people large. Send everyone to exchange, go pick the plan you want. It's like the ultimate choice product, right? Now, it may result in higher costs for the employee, which is always a challenge. People want greater choice at the same price. And that's the challenge that people or companies are going through. The other thing I think is worth noting is my experience when we're in a self-insured captive right now for our health plan. But before that, we were a super young population, very healthy, a health and well-being company. And our premiums are going up 10%, 12% every year. And we're always like, why is that? And they're like, well, you're just too small. You're a price taker. They're taking every company under 50, grouping them all together, and saying this whole cohort of Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Massachusetts employers less than 50 are going to go by 12%. And so in theory, yes, there's good pools and bad pools. But the reality is my pricing that I'm experiencing doesn't really reflect my pool when I'm like a fully insured customer. So it's all interesting. I find the product incredibly interesting. I wonder if it's a – at one point before the whole government shut down in October, I thought, oh, ICRAs are picking up steam. This is going to be a little bit of a lifeline for the exchanges in a very unique way. And then all of a sudden, subsidies were pooled. There's like another set of like regulatory and legal attacks on the exchanges. And so they're still around. But I always wonder how much you can take it battered before eventually, you know, you become a failed product. Yeah. Well, I'll say this. I don't disagree with some of the things you said. There is this fundamental power that lies with the carriers. And I don't know what they're thinking on this topic. Back when I was doing the exchange work years ago, I spoke at a conference and there was a bunch of health plans in the room. And I said – I made a prediction or a statement. I said, you better hire people who are really good at consumer-level marketing. And the reason for that is if you have a group of 200, 500 lives, 100 lives, it doesn't make a difference. As a health plan, you likely enroll all of them, right? A broker places business and they choose sometimes one health plan with two options, three options, one option. But the health plan gets all the risk. And by the way, that's a good thing for the health plan because they can look at all the risk and go, I know how to price this. When you have an exchange, you have a bifurcated risk. You don't have a group of 200. You have a group of 200 and you might get two people or you might get 100 people. And you don't know which of the two or the 100 you're going to get. So if a health plan doesn't want the individual consumer market approach to happen to the group market, then they're going to find a way to price better or do something different so the renewals are not 20, 30, 40, 50%. But if they're accepting that it's going to be a consumer market, then they might be very well prepared to say, okay, well, we know how to price on an individual basis. We know how to work in an individual exchange and compete for one life at a time. And if they choose to do that, then my prediction will go out the window. You'll see numbers enroll higher than what I – or on track with what some of the pundits are saying. Yeah, we'll see. It's interesting. Well, probably a good place to stop. Dave, thank you again for being our first guest. I know you set the bar high. I do know that, right? So I appreciate your time. You're always a good friend and always a good person to talk to about these things. And thank you, everyone, for listening. Like and subscribe our podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And have a great week.