Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to Align for Impact. I'm your host, Matthew Naylor. I started this podcast because healthcare and leadership both come down to the same thing. Alignment. When people, purpose and performance connect, real impact happens.
On this show, we'll talk with entrepreneurs, brokers, and change makers who are challenging what is broken in healthcare and in business and find new ways to make a difference for companies, communities, and the people they serve.
Well, Kevin, welcome to this awesome show. It's about alignment. It's about impact.
I'm really excited about our conversation today about Stop Loss Reinsurance and the Stop Loss Marketplace. But I love to start our conversation.
There's learning about you and your background. You know, it's always interesting to me that people find their way into the insurance business somehow. And I love to start with, like, you know, where'd you grow up? Where are you from?
And then ultimately, how did you get into the insurance business? Your career?
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Great, Matt, thanks. I've had the privilege to listen to all of the published podcasts.
That makes this conversation both invigorating and a little intimidating.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: But, yeah, I would go back before where I came from to my parents because they're foundationally important to who I became. And I know your relationship with especially your dad was super important to you.
So. My father was born really poor.
Dirt floor in his house, poor. Shared a bed with his grandmother until he was a teenager.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: They lived in West Virginia at the time.
Ended up moving to Kentucky, and my grandfather became an engraver and ultimately did engraving for US Presidents in the Mint.
And so really neat story, kind of for that. My dad ended up going to law school. Never practiced, but took his JD and then entered the military and built a career for himself in the military. 33 years running Navy SEAL and nuclear submarine bases by the time he retired.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Yeah. So as a youth, the parties at my house were admirals and fleet commanders and Navy seals and so had to show up in a certain way to entertain those folks.
My mom is from northern Minnesota.
Definitely lower middle class, working kind of family.
Her father was in India in World War II.
Came home and worked in the taconite mines up there.
Built their house that they lived in until they passed away in early 2000s. It sold for $75,000.
Small town, you know, not.
Not well off.
And she ultimately became a teacher first and then entered the military as well and worked in education administration for, like, the Naval War College and installations like that around the U.S.
and so, you know, when I came along, I was born in California and I moved several times with them. But then I actually moved more for myself, for sports as well as for work.
And so I've lived on both coasts. I've lived in Canada and about a dozen stops in between. And each one shaping a worldview about what's possible and what's out there.
And so when I entered, well, so I was a nice hockey player, as you know, and I was playing at top level at the time and had a leg injury that immediately ended that career for me.
And I didn't know what I was going to do. Completely lost.
And what I think is interesting is I could have gone to drugs or alcohol or women or some other vice that could have been really catastrophic.
I turned a really addictive personality to education.
So when I went to college at that time, if you took more than 12 credits, they were free.
So I averaged 24 credits a semester.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: Yeah. With the naive notion that I was going to learn something, not that I was getting a job or needed to get a job.
And so ultimately ended with a bachelor's degree in psychology.
Didn't find out until years later. I was one class shy of a degree in exercise science, One class shy of a degree in history, in one class shy of a degree in world religions.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Ended up with seven minors because I
[00:05:03] Speaker A: just took lots of classes. Yeah.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Lots of things that were interesting to me.
And then went out into the workforce and started in hospital systems where I ran a physiological testing center, worked collaboratively with physical therapy, fibromyalgia before it was an official diagnosis. I worked on the leading physicians around lap band surgery and what that was doing as it was emerging as a thing in the late 90s, early 2000s, and then some other programming. And so I did that for a good bit of time.
And then I took a detour, if you want to call it that. I went and worked for a company training athletes around the world.
And so going back to that exercise science and sports background.
And left, ultimately left that employment, started my own company doing that, sold that company, ultimately moved back east due to some family requirements. And where I found a job opening a sports training facility that was owned by another hospital system, coincidentally. And created more relationships to do at that point it would be additional, like gastric surgery procedures. And we. So we started another program for that hospital system around kind of where I had my roots. And my start did a left there to do some national, international, nonprofit work where we were certifying hospital systems around the world for Americans to get care and then ultimately get repatriated back to the US when they were healthy and asked to meet certain standards in order to get qualified for care.
From there I got recruited into a large insurance company, did several different jobs within that large insurance company, built a lot of really great relationships, got to know the business from that side of the equation. So the provider side has one worldview, the insurance company side has a different worldview.
And then ultimately from the relationships there was recruited to run an insurance brokerage agency agency who has a third worldview perspective on the ecosystem in which we operate today.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: I think that's really cool that you had the payer, you had the provider and you had the broker view.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a really interesting convergence of what the market's doing.
I'm also naturally a consumer and then both in running an agency as well as owning my own business, I was a procurer of benefits for my employees or the people who work for me. And so of the five key constituents in what we do, I've had a hand or a role in all five at some point.
[00:07:59] Speaker A: That's really cool. That's really cool. Well, Kevin, here at Crumdale Specialty Stop loss reinsurance is a really, really important thing to a self funded medical plan.
And you know, I find our industry at like a inflection point. You know, I've spent 30 years in the employer space and a lot of that around stop Loss reinsurance. And I think we're at a moment in time where stop loss for so long has been viewed as a commodity. You know, if you can drive to the lowest premium and get some decent coverage, that's how a lot of brokers have made their decisions on procuring and purchasing stop loss for their self funded medical plans. Whether it's level funded, self funded or it's a captive.
You know, the market is seeing a lot of volatility. You know, they've seen a lot, the market has seen a lot of severity with claims, but they've also seen a significant increase in frequency of claims. And I think the market's at this place where there's going to be big winners, there's going to be big losers.
And I love to start with what your perspective is of just the stop loss market. Where has it been?
Where do you think it is at this moment in time and then where do you think it's headed? And then we can get into some real great dialogue about what is unique about stop Loss and how we do things here at Crumdale Specialty.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a fascinating perspective of and view into the world of what is new. Was Once old or what's old is now new again.
We go through these cycles periodically. I don't know that we've seen one like this. I'm at 29 years in the greater healthcare space. I don't know that we've seen a cycle quite like this in that time. I'm not sure you've seen it in your 35 years.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: And when you say cycle, what does that mean to you?
[00:10:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And so the commoditization is somewhat pendulum actioned. Where it goes from being a hyper commodity to being value driver.
Price elasticity is along the same lines.
Is money really expensive or is money really cheap? Are loss ratios really good? Are loss ratios very difficult? And depending upon how those things come together, you know, then you get a pricing action that can be challenging or expensive or less expensive.
And each of those things have their own position in how it plays out in the market where it's been.
I think being a commodity is unfortunately reflective of how legacy brokers treated almost everything that they provided.
Because it was about getting the lowest price.
And value wasn't as important at a period in time. It was about lowest price. And so you'd go out to 30 different options, you'd put them on a spreadsheet and you find the one that's the bottom and you push everybody else to get there or better and you'd go with that one.
And there weren't as many options as there were today. And so, you know, it's a little bit different world.
And buyers required them to not be brokers anymore. They required them to become consultants and to be consultative. And that sense of commoditization was hard to let go of because who can let go of the lowest price?
But then you had to come up with reasons. And so value started to be built into lowest price. And you started to get provisions like no new laser or rate cap or four year run in that had a cost to them with no added price because money was cheap, interest rates were low and the markets were performing well, loss ratios were low. And so you could afford to give away these things that had a true underlying cost with no additional price.
And then whether it's Covid, whether it's consolidation and additional players, there's a lot of pressures happening in the market.
Money is certainly much more expensive now.
The markets in certain sectors haven't performed nearly as well. Some of the safe sectors where you need to escrow funds and so those value adds are starting to be pulled out or the underlying cost is starting to have a price impact and so you have to be much more thoughtful about what it means to deliver a proposal and what's behind that proposal. And a lot of folks honestly don't know what was in their contract to start with. And so when they start pulling things out and then they get surprised, it becomes an E and O risk potentially. It certainly can become a reputational risk or minimally a friction risk. And friction is not good in any system, especially as a consultant, when your agreement with the, with your employer, your client is a day to day, moment to moment agreement, they could rescind that agent of record letter at any time.
And so it creates a different kind of pressure for those consultants and the providers of stop loss solutions to really dive in and understand what's in the contract, how to effectively move the cost levers so that you get to the not just the lowest price, but the highest value and the value that executes.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: And Kevin, what? You know, just for the audience, you know, we use acronym, lots of acronyms in insurance. People don't necessarily know what they mean. And when we talk about stop loss, what is stop loss and what is it protecting?
[00:14:02] Speaker B: Yeah, when you make it really simple, it's, you know, it's a backstop in a baseball game. You know, the game happens in front of you and some point a pitch gets past the catcher and you need something to stop the ball.
I mean that to me is stop loss. It's really there to protect the employer and it's there to protect their plan. Because in self funded world, the employer is the plan sponsor, they're the owner, the fiduciary of the plan. And so the backstop there is really to protect them, protect their business and ultimately protect the financial security they're able to deliver for their customers and their employees and their families.
[00:14:42] Speaker A: And what type of stop loss is sold to a self insured medical plan? Whether it's in a captive, not in a captive, whether it's just traditionally self insured. What type of reinsurance and stop loss do people buy and why do they buy it?
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Yeah, so most employers are buying stop loss. You buy it on the individual member level. So individual stop loss, sometimes specific stop loss, the names go in and out, but then you're really protecting the financial risk of that member such that if they have claims of a dollar value up to that limit, the employer pays that over that limit, the insurance company picks that up and that's what that premium dollar goes to, is that risk over that limit. The second piece of stop loss is aggregate stop loss and that is now ensuring the total membership for that group. And so if that total membership's experience exceeds the projected level, then the insurance is there to pick up that excess or that extra cost that goes beyond what was predicted and planned for in the underlying claims funding premium.
[00:15:56] Speaker A: So one of the coverages in Kevin is for severity, protecting a client, an employer against a large one time claim against a member at a very catastrophic level. Is that a fair way to look at it?
[00:16:14] Speaker B: I think that's one option or an accumulation of multiple claims for the one person that add up to be a
[00:16:19] Speaker A: large severe and then the other coverage is for a lot of frequency of claims amongst the group. Is that the second type of coverage?
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Yeah. So you get stuck in a situation where everybody's using the plan at a medium to medium high level, but not enough that they trigger that individual stop loss level. And so it protects everybody.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: Got it, Got it.
[00:16:45] Speaker B: And I love to use car insurance or homeowner's insurance. It's sort of the same thing. You know, individual stop loss is like your deductible. If you crack a windshield they'll give you a thousand bucks or you have to pay the first thousand and they'll pay the rest. Right. It's that acute event.
But then you have coverage for if you get in an accident, for expenses for everything else. If you break a sign, if you hit another car and they're injured. Right. You have that umbrella coverage that creates everything else. And so it's sort of a similar setup just on the health insurance side. We make it feel much more complicated when we say health insurance. It's the one place in us buying that we abdicate our agency and authority and sometimes our own thoughtfulness and we make because we think it's so complicated and hard and in some ways it is. But if we can relate it to something very simple and common like health, like aut insurance or home insurance which we all have, or renters insurance.
When we think about it like that, the mechanisms are very, very similar.
[00:17:46] Speaker A: Kevin, it sounds like this stop loss reinsurance is a really important component to a self funded medical plan.
What impacts the premium that someone gets charged for the stop loss that they're purchasing?
What are the underlying things like a plan document or cost containment or the lack thereof of optimization, integration, what's impacting the premium?
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Yeah, Matt, that's such a great point that you're leading me towards here. Is self funded as a category is like a gym membership. Just because you pay the membership doesn't mean you get the results you want. You haven't met more friends or you haven't gotten stronger, or you haven't lost weight, Whatever your goal is, just because you pay the membership doesn't mean you're accomplishing your goals.
Self funded is the same way.
And the next thing I hear is well, I'm self funded, so it must be cheaper.
That's not true. So then I hear, well, the claims are the claims.
And that might be the second biggest fallacy to self funding.
A claim is a claim.
It could look very different based on where it's delivered, where care is delivered. It could look very different based on the type of delivery model that it was provided in.
It could look different based on any number of factors that if you don't have somebody looking after you and protecting you, that claim could be, you know, $5,000 at one place, it could be $400 at another place. And so having really strong cost containment programs, whether that are part of your TPA or that you third party administrator, not to use another acronym, but that you can add in, you know, it could be a local community resource, there's any number of options in front of employers.
Again, that's only one component. A second component is the plan document. The plan document governs everything else. It tells you what is included in the insurance coverage, it tells you how much, it tells you how often, it tells you what the rules of the road are for how claims should be processed, how claims should be considered, and how stop loss should pay those claims when they come up.
And so you know, there are the all starts with the plan document.
It once you have a really well crafted plan document and you follow the rules of the road, you know, then it is all right, what can we do to make the road better and can we make it smoother, can we make it wider? You know, whatever helps traffic flow better so that it happens at the right place, at the right time and ultimately at the right price for the highest possible outcome.
And so you know, are there are claims being charged twice or duplicate claims or three times or more?
Do you have a cranial support device for $50,000 on your bill, which by the way is a pillow that costs $12 at, you know, at the store.
And all of these things happen, you know, do you have a bill charge of $35,000 but a network reimbursement of $65,000 because they've est reimbursement rate that's higher than billed as an offset for asking the hospital to take a haircut on some other service.
You should never pay more than billed charges. And so having people looking out for that, whether it's an auditing program, a bill review, claim review, these types of programs for, you know, payment integrity, fraud, waste and abuse.
Because unfortunately our system is rife with opportunity to create revenue for somebody that the employer's paying for and they shouldn't.
[00:21:55] Speaker A: You know Kevin, after 30 years of being in the employer health space, I've never seen the market like it is at this moment in time. I think the market is premiums are going up significantly, Healthcare inflation's a real thing.
And when we think about stop loss, it's a very durable product, it's a very resilient product, it's a very resilient market.
But I think premiums are going to go up significantly here over the next several years and I think they're going to go up significantly because there's been a lack of real optimization and integration and leveraging of data and AI to drive to a lower cost. When you really think about plan document, case management, pre cert disease management networks, high performing networks, narrow networks, you know, care navigation around, like how do you get someone to the the best facility at the lowest possible cost? It hasn't been really tethered together properly for a very long time. When you think about a self and the alignment of interest, the transparency hasn't been there. Like what's good for the employer and customer have been misaligned for a very long time. And the stop loss market has bared the brunt of that for like the last 30 years big time.
And recently in the last 12 months I think I'm correct. But there's been a lot of people that have exited the stop loss marketplace.
A lot of capacity.
When you think of Zork or Hanover Re or Swiss Re and others and maybe I'm getting a name right, maybe I'm getting a name wrong, but there's a lot of people that were in the market that are now out of the market which is going to drive premiums up. I think there's a real flight to quality. When the stop loss markets are thinking about who they're partnering with, there's a real flight to a stop loss carrier MGU saying hey, I need to find partners that are going to help me drive to a better loss ratio and a better mlr.
From your perspective Kevin, what's Crumbdale specialty doing that you think is really unique and different?
To do what's right for the customer, to do what's right for the member, but also to do what's right for A trading partner, a stop loss partner that helps us do what we do every day for our customers.
[00:24:21] Speaker B: Yeah, Matt, there's a lot in that question and you'll forgive me for taking a slight tangent and I'll get back to your core question there.
I think it's important for a lot of people to understand that the employer stop loss market, it grew out of the PNC market.
In fact, it was considered a PNC coverage for a long, long time.
And some of the carriers you mentioned and others, employee benefits, stop loss is a really small percentage of their total business model.
And so the insurance space, the healthcare space, which is where I want to focus this comment, is working exactly like it was designed.
It was designed to be complicated and complex. It was designed to drive profitability, it was designed to be, you know, somewhat disconnected and to try and have large carriers hold it all together.
It was designed in a way that worked 30 years ago, 35 years ago, 40 years ago, with some of the unforeseen consequences of today's environment, how big it is in terms of our GDP as an employer, as a lobbying power. And at one point we saw the banks were too big to fail and that didn't come true.
I think there was a hubris in the healthcare space that says we're too big to fail and we're on the brink of finding out whether we are or we are not.
And you know, so when you think about carrier partners and looking for quality delivery partners, the need to really focus on driving profitability because they do have to be profitable in order to return to, to keeping the coverage going is required a different set of levers and mechanics to make that happen than it used to. And we're talking about self funded stop loss. So this I think is interesting too. Almost everything used to be fully insured.
Stop loss for self funded stop loss was reserved for the biggest customers.
50,000 employee lives, then 10,000 employee lives, then 5,000 employee lives. Now you can be five and go self funded. And people who, or customers, clients, employers who went self funded on the smaller end were the best risk. And they said we think we can do better on the, on our own than what the pool is giving us. We're subsidizing other people's experience and it's costing us money, it's costing us the ability to invest in our company or hire new people, retain good people.
And every year that the bed, the best risk of that year goes into the self funded market, it's the next tier down of bad risk in the fully insured market. And so now the, the what is the self funded pool where it was nice cold water and you could go in, it's starting to heat up. And so what did the best self funded risk go do? They said, well let's go to a captive.
And so you know, you saw a flood in the, you see a flood into the captive environment.
And that you know again was the best risk. Well, every year the best risk goes into it is a next layer of poor risk.
It's the best today, but the best left last year. So now it's the next layer of poor risk. So now you see the captive warming up.
And so the one question that we're going to leave this podcast with, cause I don't know the answer is what's next? Because the best captive risk is going to look for another solution that gives them the best chance to contain cost.
And so as you work through that transition, it no longer becomes about just taking the best risk and putting it someplace else. It's how do we make all of the risk better? So the best risk continues to be the best, but each layer gets closer to being equal to the best risk.
And just non discriminately putting people together is not the way to go. And so what I love about what we do at Crumbdale is we architect the plan document for our health plan services customers. We architect the plan document document and we make sure that it fully details the plan and it protects the employer from a risk perspective. It protects the member to make sure they get the care that they need at the highest value places and the cost will be taken care of through other programs.
So we start there. We worked really hard to get our contracting right. Right.
We then work really hard on our administrative platform to make sure that that administrative platform understands the plan document executes according to the plan document. And if they don't, there's consequences that they have to bear the brunt of. Our employers should not have to bear the brunt of that nor our stop loss partners so that they're executing according to that contract.
And then we have with our data, with our AI constantly monitoring claims every night looking for duplicate claims or egregiously low discounts or egregiously high billed charges. We're actively monitoring that on a prepay basis because once you pay the claim, getting those dollars back is almost impossible. So let's manage it on the prepay basis so that the stop loss carrier never has to pay the claim in the first place.
Cost containment programs like what we're doing on the pharmacy.
Some of our programs are not being done by anybody else or some of the partners we work with won't allow these things to happen with anybody else. We've created a very special relationship with these partners because we are bringing them total value. We're bringing them, yes, we're bringing them membership, but we're bringing them loyalty, we're bringing them execution, we're bringing them a sense of professional moral and ethic where we're going to stand up when we make a mistake and we're going to stand up when they make a mistake. Because in it together this is a partnership and when we win, then we also win together. And we're winning a lot more often than we make mistakes. But claims happen every second of every day.
And we're all human at the end of the day.
And so when those things happen, let's stand up and own it and let's do it together.
It's not about criticizing, condemning, pointing fingers. It's about let's do it together. So I think that's really important. Builds a lot of trust. And when you have trust, then they're willing to, to help you in other ways.
We also have not commoditized any of our trading partners.
When you commoditize a trading partner, they will not give you the best price because if you're gonna sell a piece of business today and move it next year, that's not good for them. It's expensive to bring on new business.
But if you sell a piece of business and you're doing all the right things to maximize the effect of renewal, then they're going to help give you a better price. Because that lifetime customer journey value over just trying to get the highest price on day one.
And so I think that's really important. What we do with our trading partners is highly unique. It's like nothing I've seen in my almost 30 years in the healthcare space.
And then I would say the willingness to be entrepreneurial and really try to do things that are different and not be afraid to fail at it.
And let's fail quickly or let's succeed well and do so in a really team oriented, collaborative environment with our broker partners, I mean unbelievably smart broker partners. Some of the best ideas we have come from them.
We have really some very sophisticated client base. They've got great ideas. How do we incorporate those? Our staff is, is the strongest collective of intellectual minds that I've seen in my time.
They have a ton of great ideas. So how do we bring all Those great ideas together and where one plus one plus one is three, we're getting exponential lift and it's 33.
And so we do that, I think better than most in the market.
[00:32:54] Speaker A: Kevin, you sound really passionate. You sound like you have a real purpose. It sounds like you have a lot of joy doing what you're doing.
What are you excited like when you look out a year or two or three years from now you have a North Star around our Stop Loss business and what we're doing as a company.
What do you see that? How do you see the North Star? Where do you think the business is going?
[00:33:19] Speaker B: Yeah, we're going to a place where Stop Loss carriers believe in what we're doing as much or more than we do.
Our broker partners believe in what we're doing as much or more than we do and our customers believe in it as well.
[00:33:39] Speaker A: Why is that? Is there a real tangible ROI when somebody.
Because it's one thing for me to hear that and say someone believes in you, but what are we showing them to deliver a real result?
[00:33:54] Speaker B: Yeah, part of it's manifesting what you believe in.
Right. If every day you're believing negativity, you're gonna manifest negativity. I mean I have so much optimism and belief in where we're headed that it's infectious and you can manifest your own destiny in that way. But we are delivering meaningful results. Whether it's in our pharmacy cost containment channel management programs where we're taking a drug that might process at the pharmacy is $30,000 and it's you know, $2,500 and that employee has a cost share, you know, they're paying less money at the pharmacy, the employer's paying less money. The Stop Loss never saw that claim
[00:34:36] Speaker A: by the way, Kevin, I had a report today, I saw it this morning. We had a pharmaceutical drug come through for one of our captive customers. It was $900,000 billed because we have JCO management and we moved the, the infusion to in home. We took it from $900,000. It was going to be a, it was going to be like a $800,000 back head. I think they had a hundred thousand dollar deductible and the individual had a high deductible health plan. I think it was about a $10,000 high deductible health plan.
We moved it into home, waived the full deductible and took the $900,000 bill charge for and an $800,000 spec claim to. I think it was like down to about $500 for the same, like $900,000, like ridiculous. Like something I'd never, ever, ever, ever have seen in my entire life. Like that's what I'm talking about when I'm asking you the question, like the real roi.
[00:35:41] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's same thing for some in network medical care. I mean, the pharmacy is an easy one because we see it all over the television. But same thing with medical care. You could go to an MRI on the left side of the street and it's $15,000 and you go to the left side of the street and it's $300.
We know, we absolutely know. When a member calls our advocates team and they say I need a copy of my ID card that within five to seven days they have a procedure and if you just hand them the ID card, they're going to where it's most expensive because that's where their doctors told them to go because that's where their doctor's bosses have told them they need to send them. But our advocates go the next layer deeper and ask the question about, oh, what do you have upcoming where the I.D. card's necessary? Oh, you're having an MRI. Have you chosen a facility for that yet? Oh yeah, it was wonderful. You know, there's five other options in your area and they're going to save you X number of dollars. And they're helping them, they're proactively helping them. It's not just an answer.
[00:36:45] Speaker A: And sounds like all this stuff really benefits our Stop Loss trading partners by how we do it.
[00:36:52] Speaker B: Absolutely. Every dollar we do not spend in care. And by do not spend, I don't mean denying care, I mean redirecting care or finding other ways to pay it other than the employer and the plan sponsor is less exposure for the Stop Loss carrier. They never see a claim because that $900,000 claim and $800,000 in write offs, if you have $100,000 individual stop loss at, you know, the $500 or $50, they never ever see that claim.
And so the premium that they're collecting as a risk for claims never materializes.
And so yeah, we do that. We see that over and over and over again. I'll tell you, I've been, I've spent the first half of this year bringing our Stop Loss partners into our Paoli, Pennsylvania office and have them sit down with all of our.
What we're doing on the pharmacy side, what we're doing on the medical management side, what we're doing with data and AI, what we're doing with our training partners for cost containment for specific care, navigation, fraud, waste and abuse, maybe specialty care.
I have them sit down with our nurses, with our compliance team talking about the contracting and to a person, they have all told me that we are doing, we're actually doing and executing on. They're seeing it in the performance of our results.
What others are talking about and can't prove out.
[00:38:23] Speaker A: I love it.
[00:38:24] Speaker B: And so they're giving us credit.
One of the most frustrating pieces for them is and like point solutions are everywhere is they'll come is point solution will come and say we can save you money. And they say show me the data. Well, we're new, we know we can do these things. Oh, and by the way, it's only $5 pepm.
And they say, well wait, you want me to take the risk on your efficacy and pay you for the, for that opportunity?
Whereas when you really perform well, they say here's. We sit down with them and say here's 10 years worth of data.
We have had this many claims come in, we've redirected or cost contained this many. We're running today at, you know, our PBM trend is running at less than 40% of the national market. PBM trend as an example, our medical trend is, you know, 25% lower than others in the market. And we can show that year over year. And so then they say, okay, how do we partner when the case comes in? How do we identify these things? Because we see 10 or 20% of, of price credit we can give you that we're not going to give to somebody else.
[00:39:37] Speaker A: It's awesome. It's awesome. And that gets passed along to the customer. At the end of the day, it's
[00:39:41] Speaker B: a straight pass through to the customer.
[00:39:43] Speaker A: So the customer's winning and benefiting through this whole process.
[00:39:46] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:39:47] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. It's so cool. Kevin, what question did I not ask you that you really wanted me to ask you?
[00:39:55] Speaker B: We covered a lot of ground today, Matt.
I think about, I guess the question is maybe why I chose Crumbdale.
[00:40:09] Speaker A: I was going to ask you that question.
The big moat around any business, you know how I feel about this is the talent and the team.
And I think obviously as a founder, it holds a special place in my heart for sure.
But I think you have a view of why you think Crumdale is so special and why you joined the organization. And maybe Kevin had some of it to do with me. But this is a really special team and a very special place. I love to hear your perspective on that.
[00:40:42] Speaker B: Yeah. So I met you first.
We had a half hour phone call on a Monday that lasted two hours.
We hit it off and we talked about, about all sorts of topics.
And finally I think your your assistant came in and grabbed you and jerked you off the phone and said, you gotta go.
But before we left that call, coincidentally your son was doing a sports expo where I live and we agreed to meet. I think it was that Thursday, same week, we met for coffee. We ended up talking for another couple hours until your son texted you and said, are you coming to get me?
[00:41:17] Speaker A: I remember that summer day in Richmond. It was a great day.
[00:41:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And so, you know, we were just so fundamentally aligned. You I saw I spent a lot of years in a place where I contributed and I'm not necessarily proud of this, but I contributed to the dysfunction and the cost escalation that was bankrupting US companies and their employees and their families. And frankly, I was sick of it. I was looking for a different way to attack it. And just the way you saw where you wanted to head with Crumbdale and the impact we could make starting with, with small and mid sized companies, which is the hardest segment to attack.
Knowing full well that we're going to execute proficiently there, learn a lot and then take it upstream and move up market and start to deliver for bigger and bigger customers was a someplace that I wanted to be at this point in my career. Matt I'm not going to be remembered for probably anything that I create or develop, whether past or in the future with Grumdale. What I hope I'm remembered for is creating a sense of legacy through other people.
How many young, talented, mid career, even end of career talent can I help get better in some way? And then how many more people can they reach? Because the people are really the legacy we leave behind.
And that sense of leverage, if I touch 2, they touch 2, they touch 12. And that to me is where I want to spend my time. And so what you've really given me the opportunity to do not only impact the business, but impact our people in a very positive way, impact our brokers who are impacting employers and using that reach through the power of many to really spread the perspective of there's a better way. You have agency, we just have to demand it and then go get it and be persistent and adamant about that.
And in that pursuit we can make a dramatic difference for the US economy, the US Healthcare, specifically employee benefits and how that's utilized and the impact it makes for employees and their families.
[00:43:29] Speaker A: Kevin I remember that day we had a cup of coffee.
I'm a high EQ person.
Emotional intelligence is important to me.
And I could tell when I met you that day.
You were a great husband, you were a great father.
You had a lot to contribute to a business.
You had a passion, you had a purpose.
You wanted to find a place where you could find happiness and joy.
And I'm very thankful and grateful that we came together several years ago. And you've done an amazing job here at Crumdale Specialty. And myself and the team are lucky to have you. So thanks.
[00:44:07] Speaker B: Well, I appreciate that. That's a two way street.
[00:44:12] Speaker A: This is Matthew Naylor. You've been listening to Aligned for Impact.
