Benefits brokers who wait until renewal notices land before engaging clients are already too late and the consequences can be double-digit premium increases and missed opportunities to change outcomes for employees' lives.
That is the view of Jennifer Schaefer, founder and chief executive officer of JS Benefits Group in Newtown, Pennsylvania, who has shared her insights with Insurance Business America from more than three decades in the group benefits industry.
She began her career in 1993, initially as a financial planner before pivoting to employee benefits by purchasing online leads at a time when most brokers had not yet recognized the internet's potential. Since then, she has built a 26-person firm that writes business across most US states, with a concentration in the Mid-Atlantic region.
Her central message for benefits brokers and employers right now is stop treating renewal as a once-a-year event.
"Businesses will wait until the renewals release, and when they do that, it doesn't give them time to really lay down a strategy for their renewal in the upcoming year," Schaefer told Insurance Business America. "In three years, five years, you want to have a blueprint. What are you trying to accomplish?"
Schaefer says a significant number of fully insured groups in her market received premium increases of 17 percent in their most recent cycle and that figure is difficult to absorb without a multi-year plan in place.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation's (KFF) 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey average family premiums for employer-sponsored coverage rose six percent that year, nearing $27,000 annually, with workers themselves paying an average of $6,850 out of their paychecks.
For employers who have not engaged their broker in a year-round strategy, those numbers arrive as a shock rather than a managed outcome.
Schaefer recommends that brokers establish either monthly or quarterly touchpoints with clients, depending on the size of the employer. The goal is not simply to review claims data but to build the kind of trust that allows a broker to introduce more complex funding arrangements over time.
"It's like a stepping stone," she said. "Maybe we should consider a health reimbursement arrangement (HRA), and then it's maybe we should consider level funded, and then looking at self-insured and captives over time – because some of the insurance companies really hold that data that I think can be helpful for a business."
While a level-funded plan blends fixed monthly payments with access to claims data and potential refunds for good performance, offering small and mid-size employers greater transparency than traditional fully insured coverage, self-insured and captive arrangements go further, allowing employers to take direct ownership of their claims risk and costs.
Pharmacy spend and specifically GLP-1 medications used for weight management and diabetes treatment, is increasingly a focal point in renewal planning.
Schaefer is watching the market closely. She noted that at least one major carrier in her region has already stopped covering GLP-1 drugs, and the recent decision by Starbucks to eliminate GLP-1 coverage for its workforce is a signal she expects others to follow.
"If Starbucks is doing that, we're going to see a cascading effect," she said.
At the same time, Schaefer is nuanced about the medications themselves. She has seen firsthand through conversations with clients and their employees how GLP-1 therapies have improved blood pressure, cholesterol, and mobility for individuals who struggled with obesity-related conditions.
One approach for employers who want to remain supportive without absorbing open-ended pharmacy costs is to fund GLP-1 access through a separate HRA or a dedicated supplemental program, rather than embedding it in the core medical plan.
"It's saying, yes, we care about you, here's $100 a month towards your GLP-1s," she said. "And I think it helps lessen the blow."
Pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) transparency is also a theme.
Schaefer emphasizes that employers moving toward captives or self-insured arrangements need clear line-of-sight into what they are spending on prescriptions and how those drugs are being sourced.
She is currently working with one group transitioning to a captive that has explicitly requested the ability to use smaller, independent pharmacies; a preference that is being built into the plan design.
One reason employers in the 25-to-250-employee range remain stuck in the renewal cycle, Schaefer argues, is that they often cannot access meaningful claims data under fully insured arrangements.
Under many carrier contracts, detailed utilization reports are not available to employers with fewer than 100 covered lives, which means brokers have limited raw material to work with unless the employer is willing to shift funding strategy.
"That becomes a problem, but it's also an opportunity where groups start to say, we do want that data and we do want to improve our benefits for our employees," Schaefer said. Even modest steps – such as adopting an HRA that generates reimbursement data – can begin to illuminate patterns in how a workforce uses healthcare.
For employers not yet ready for that shift, Schaefer has been introducing gap coverage products for smaller fully insured groups in states where regulations permit. These plans supplement a high-deductible health plan by covering out-of-pocket costs that fall between the deductible and out-of-pocket maximum, providing a lower-cost bridge while the employer builds confidence in alternatives.
On employee wellness, Schaefer says programs that reward already-healthy employees first are missing the point.
"You want to target your most vulnerable," she said. "The money needs to be spent on people that are most vulnerable."
She described a JS Benefits Group team member who attended a client wellness event and emerged visibly shaken after a biometric screening detected a kidney condition that required specialist follow-up.
She also referenced a current client whose young employee suffered a stroke in his thirties, an event that is generating significant claims and will affect the group's renewal, and that early biometric intervention might have prevented or mitigated.
"If you could help and that all goes, his life has changed very much, but the claims that are going to be rolling in for this company, and what that's going to do to the renewal," she said. "I think it's those stories of talking to people that can help sometimes."
The dual framing of human impact alongside financial consequence is, she says, how brokers should approach the C-suite, which does not always align with HR teams on the value of wellness investment. Connecting wellness outcomes to retention, recruitment, and workplace culture rather than just medical loss ratios, is more likely to win executive buy-in.
When asked what advice she would give a broker trying to shift clients from annual renewal conversations to year-round cost management, Schaefer's answer is to show up consistently.
"Meet regularly, and I would tell anybody that is on my sales team or a broker that they should be meeting regularly," she said. "You need to be in this business all day, every day, and learning."
She described a long-tenured broker losing business from a family friend due to falling behind on market developments. The employer moved to JS Benefits Group after discovering the savings available through a more current strategy. "That broker could have shown them what we did and they would still have the client today," Schaefer said.
For employers who are still wary of more complex plan structures, the goal is to build trust incrementally.
"You have to be open to ideas, and you have to start early," she said. "Businesses will say, call us back in September, our renewal is in December. And I wish I knew them better to say, look, you really should talk to us now."
Brokers who can reframe benefits from an annual administrative task to a strategic business lever (one that affects culture, retention, and the bottom line) are the ones, Schaefer believes, who will still have their clients when the next renewal notice arrives.
