“Competitive” should be a number you can take to a CFO, not an adjective.
Every employer asks whether their plan is competitive, and most get a national average back. A national average blends a thirty-life design firm with a twenty-thousand-life hospital system, which means it describes neither. The comparison that matters is against employers who look like you: your size band, your region, your industry, your funding model.
Premium is the least interesting number on the page.
Our benchmarking survey covers nearly a thousand employers. The useful output is not where your premium sits — it is where the money lands on an employee, because that is what determines whether staff value the plan or quietly resent it.
Contribution strategy
What share of single and family coverage you fund, by tier. Two employers with identical premiums can present completely different offers depending on how the family tier is subsidized, and the family tier is where employees make their decision.
Out-of-pocket exposure
Deductible, coinsurance and the maximum an employee can actually be asked to pay in a bad year. Smaller employers tend to carry markedly higher deductibles than large ones, so a small-group plan benchmarked against a national figure will read as generous when it is not.
Plan design against peers
Medical and ancillary coverage scored against employers matched on size, industry and region, with the gaps named rather than scored away. A score with nothing underneath it is a sales document.
A benchmark without a trend line tells you where you are, not where you are going.
We draw three lines on every account, because they disagree and the disagreement is the insight.
The national line
Medical trend is running roughly 9 to 10 percent before plan changes and about 6.5 to 7.6 percent after them. The gap between those two figures is cost shifted to employees, not cost removed from the system.
The local line
Michigan small group filings were approved at 11.1 percent for 2026, with 9.6 percent filed for 2027. Above fifty lives nothing is filed with the state at all, so a filed average is context rather than a forecast for a mid-market group.
Your own line
Your renewal history, repriced on a held census so headcount changes do not masquerade as savings. It takes several consecutive renewals to draw it, which is why we ask for the last three.
Data with the working shown.
A peer comparison
Your plan against employers matched on the dimensions that move rates, with the cohort described so you can judge whether the comparison is fair.
Population insight
Claims and pharmacy analytics, gaps-in-care tracking and risk signals pulled into one executive view, so a benchmark arrives with the data behind it rather than as a headline.
Something to say in the meeting
One page your CFO can read in two minutes: where the plan sits, what it would cost to move, and what moving would buy.
Send us your renewal.
We’ll tell you whether it looks competitive, where we see opportunity, and the five questions we’d put to your carrier. No cost, and no obligation to move anything.
The renewal letter
Your current plan summary
Contribution split by tier
Enrolled counts by tier
Four documents — two more if your group is 50 or more. Nothing else; every extra one is a reason to postpone.
An independent employee benefits consulting firm. We look at the entire benefits program — cost, plan performance, risk and administration.
Bloomfield Hills, MI 48304
248.370.8853
719.425.2649
281.404.5670
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