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If you’re an employer group and you have a hundred or more employees and you experience what we call a significant renewal, a big rate increase. Let’s say you got a rate increase of 35, 40 percent. You had a big claim, something went wrong in your group, you’re fully insured, your insurance carrier gives you this big rate increase, what do you do about it?

Well, first of all, you’re going to rely on the experience of your broker to go out and market for you, but here’s what wins at the end of the day and bringing that price down. When I’m out there marketing in a group like this, I always remind my clients that there’s two parts to the renewal.

There’s first the math, because the underwriter is going to give you an underwriting equation that says, here’s what you paid in premium, here’s what we paid out in claims, and this is what we anticipate we’re going to be paying out in claims next year, and that’s why we need this large rate increase.

And as a broker, I can go argue the math, and that’s important to do, but at the end of the day, what’s going to bring your rate increase down is going to be the market. So there’s the math and the market. If you get that large rate increase, we’re taking your account immediately out to other health insurance carrier underwriters to see how they’re going to evaluate that math and those claims to come back with a better price for you.