By Company Size What We Do Who We Serve Resources About Our Method

By Company Size

At this size it stops being an HR conversation.

Above 250 employees your CFO is in the room. Your plan is probably self-funded, or should be. Your stop-loss placement is worth real money.

And you likely have people in more than one state, which means more than one set of rules. The question is not whether your broker can get you a quote. It is whether they can sit across from your CFO with the claims data and defend a three-year plan.

The full picture

The stop-loss is where the money is.

Above 250 lives, self-funding stops being the exception and starts being the default. The decisions that matter shift from whether to self-fund to how the risk is actually structured.

Funding Architecture

What is actually true

This is the range where self-funding becomes the norm. KFF’s 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey found 27% of covered workers at firms with 10–199 employees are in self-funded plans, versus 80% at firms with 200 or more — most employers in this band are self-funded or actively evaluating it for the first time.

What CFH does about it

We build the self-funding business case on your real numbers — claims history, stop-loss quotes, cash-flow impact — rather than a generic pitch, and manage the transition if you move.

Stop-Loss & Risk Management

What is actually true

Self-funded plans this size carry real stop-loss decisions: specific attachment points, aggregate attachment, whether the policy is written on a contract basis or a paid basis, and whether “lasering” — excluding a known high-cost claimant from coverage — is on the table at renewal.

What CFH does about it

We review the stop-loss contract language, not just the premium, and push back on lasering before it is presented as a foregone conclusion.

Multi-Site & Compliance Complexity

See the full compliance calendar and what applies at your size →

What is actually true

Employers this size commonly operate across multiple states or offices, which means network adequacy varies by location and compliance obligations — state mandates, multi-state COBRA administration — multiply instead of averaging out.

What CFH does about it

Licensed well beyond Michigan, with offices in Michigan, Colorado and Texas, we handle multi-state network and compliance questions directly instead of routing them to a call center.

Governance & Strategic Involvement

What is actually true

A CFO or benefits committee is usually involved in plan decisions at this size, and the annual renewal becomes an input to budget planning rather than a formality.

What CFH does about it

We come to that meeting with the analysis already built, so the conversation is about the decision, not about assembling the data first.

Trend

The published trend stopped describing you a while ago.

Michigan publishes every carrier’s approved rate change, and at your size almost none of it applies to you.

Where the filed numbers stop

Rates are filed with the state only for fully insured groups under fifty. Above that they are not filed at all, and a self-funded plan has no filed rate because it is not buying one. So the statewide averages that get quoted in the trade press — 11.1 percent approved for small group in 2026, 9.6 percent proposed for 2027 — describe a market you have already left.

What moves instead, on three different clocks

Your cost is claims, administration and stop-loss, and they do not move together. Stop-loss is the fastest: premiums rose roughly fourteen to sixteen percent for 2026 depending on deductible. The reason is leveraged trend — your deductible stays where it is while the claims sitting above it grow, so a year in which claims rose ten percent can produce a stop-loss renewal in the thirties with nothing unusual having happened.

At your size a single catastrophic claimant is a large enough share of the budget that this is not a rounding error, and an average of your three components is not a number anyone can act on. The figure worth having is each one measured on its own and set against what the market did — which takes the last few renewals, not only this year’s.

How we work a self-funded renewal →

How the number is built

This is the band where both numbers matter at once.

A renewal is your own claims experience blended with the carrier’s book rate, and what sets the mix is enrolled contracts, not employees. Full credibility is commonly reached at a thousand. Around five hundred contracts the two halves carry equal weight — the only place on the scale where that is true.

What the blend looks like across the range
Enrolled contracts	Your own claims	The book rate	What that means
25	2.5%	97.5%	Your claims year is almost invisible in the rate.
50	5%	95%	About where carriers start releasing claims information at all.
100	10%	90%	Nine tenths of the increase describes the market, not you.
250	25%	75%	Still mostly the book — but one large claimant now shows.
500	50%	50%	The market figure and your own experience carry equal weight.
750	75%	25%	Mostly your own claims. The market number is context now.
1,000+	100%	—	The renewal is your own claims experience, priced.

Employers between 250 and 999 sit across the shaded rows, and where exactly depends on take-up rather than headcount. Each carrier sets its own schedule, so treat the table as the shape rather than the arithmetic — the factor actually applied to your group is printed on your rate exhibit, usually beside the pooling point.

Half the increase is yours. Half is not.

That is what makes this band different from every other one. A single number that mixes the two together cannot be argued with, because nobody can say which half moved. The work here is the decomposition: how much of the increase is market trend, how much is your own claims year, and how much is a pricing decision the carrier made about its whole block.

Which is why shopping alone stops being the answer.

A competing carrier underwrites the same claims your incumbent has just seen, so there is less room for a different answer than there was a hundred contracts ago. What is available instead is the cost driver itself — where the spend concentrates and what sits behind it. Left in place, it simply moves to the next carrier with you.

See how a renewal gets taken apart

Common questions

What employers your size ask us.

We are already self-funded. What is left to do?

Usually the stop-loss. It is the part most often rolled rather than marketed, and it is where a large employer’s easiest savings tend to sit.

We have staff in six states. Can you handle that?

Yes. We are licensed well beyond Michigan, with offices in Bloomfield Hills, Colorado Springs and Houston, and we support multinational populations.

Are we not better off with a national firm?

National firms have the resources and hand you a service tier. With us you get five named people, plus the benchmarking data and the compliance bench of a firm built to back them. Ask both what happens when you call in February.

By sector

Industry decides which cost driver you are actually managing.

At several hundred employees the plan is no longer one population. It is shifts, sites, job classes and contract types, and the cost driver that dominates is an industry fact rather than a benefits one.

Manufacturing

Multiple plants, union and non-union populations on one program, and plan designs that have to survive a bargaining cycle as well as a renewal.

Health Care and Social Assistance

Around-the-clock staffing and heavy per-diem use make measurement periods a standing administrative burden rather than an annual exercise.

Transportation and Warehousing

Distributed sites and a mobile workforce make network adequacy a real question, and injury exposure puts disability and leave coordination in front of you.