She started out as a candy striper at her local hospital while still in high school, volunteering on the oncology unit before moving into cardiology. The hospital then put her through certified nurse assistant training, which opened the door to actual patient care. From there came an EMT certification and serious progress toward becoming a certified surgical technologist, right up until the final clinical semester, when lifting a large patient ruptured two vertebrae and ended that chapter rather abruptly.
It is the kind of setback that tends to define a person, one way or another. For Rider it became a pivot. She recovered, went back to school, and landed an entry-level role at health insurance carrier Great-West. That, she said, was her real introduction to employee benefits.
She moved through a small privately held brokerage, then to regional firm Gregory & Appel, where things properly took off. A master’s degree in strategic leadership and design. An HR certification. Years of consulting with mid-sized businesses and startups, and throughout all of it, an increasingly prominent role within NABIP, the National Association of Benefits and Insurance Professionals, where she rose through local and state presidencies before being elected national Secretary during COVID and eventually ascending to president.
As of July 1, she handed the gavel to incoming president Mychal Walker and stepped into the role of Immediate Past President. She is also, a full-time senior human resource consultant at Resourcing Edge a OneDigital company and continues her national board seat, while finishing her Executive Juris Doctor in Business Law at Purdue Global. Her paper on artificial intelligence and the impact of Title VII was published. Multitasking does not begin to cover it.
Here is a number worth sitting with: nearly 40%.
That is the top end of what Rider is seeing in rate increases across the small group fully insured accounts she manages heading into this renewal cycle. The low end is 7 percent. Neither figure makes for easy conversations with clients.
Two culprits keep appearing in the claims data. GLP-1 medications, once prescribed exclusively for diabetic and prediabetic patients, are now being taken widely for weight loss by people without those diagnoses. The clinical case for them is real. So is the price tag, and it lands on the plan. Then there is the specialty drug market, where a single medication for cystic fibrosis can run $70,000 a month or more. The individual patient does not see that bill. The employer’s claims experience does.
Meanwhile, brokers working the Medicare side felt the ground shift at the end of 2025, when commission cuts reshaped their market. The knock-on effect in group benefits is that baby boomers are now running more complex calculations around Medicare eligibility, COBRA, and whether staying on the employer’s plan still makes financial sense. That is not a spreadsheet question. It requires a Medicare consultant who knows what they are talking about and is certified. NABIP offers a Medicare Certification course that is updated annually to keep its members ahead of the market.
Faced with increases like these, smaller employers are starting to borrow ideas from the big players, and frankly it is overdue.
Level funded products are the conversation happening most frequently right now. Partially self-funded but designed to feel administratively like a conventional fully insured plan, they also come with something interesting: if the plan performs well, the employer can earn a rebate, allowing a portion of unused funds at year end and roll it into the next renewal. For a 35 person business that has never had that kind of flexibility before, it changes the dynamic significantly.
Captive arrangements are attracting interest further up the size scale. Groups of mid-sized employers pool together, share risk, and access cost containment strategies that companies the size of Cummins Engines take advantage of. Scale is the whole game here, and if you can borrow someone else’s ideas and implement them, you probably should.
Reference-based pricing rounds out the toolkit. Employers negotiate rates at a percentage of Medicare for specific procedures, with the assistance of their third party administrator doing the legwork before the patient even walks through the door seeking non-emergent care, generally in a hospital setting or surgery centre. The versions Rider has seen work best are the ones where cost is agreed and pre-certified upfront. A little extra work on the front end. A great deal less confusion afterward.
Rate management is one half of the equation. The other half is considerably messier: figuring out what five generations of employees actually want from their benefits, and making it work within a budget that is already under pressure.
“I think employers are having to look at things a little bit more strategically, asking questions of their employees, getting to know their employees on a human level,” Rider said, and she means it literally. The 25-year-old who has a dog instead of a dependant and would rather bank money in a health savings account has almost nothing in common, benefits-wise, with the 58 year old watching the Medicare clock and wanting the predictability of a copay plan. They work at the same company. They sit at adjacent desks. And a one-size solution fits neither of them.
Rider has a straightforward view on which employers are winning this: “The employers that are willing to survey their populations on a regular basis, ask some of the tough questions, I think they are the ones that are standing out from a total compensation perspective,” she said.
The voluntary benefits choices are becoming a signal in themselves. Small businesses, are not legally required to offer paid parental leave under federal rules, are increasingly offering it as a retention tool, responding to a workforce that has started asking the question. Pet insurance has moved from novelty to genuine recruitment consideration in certain demographics. These are not soft extras. They are the difference between a benefits package that speaks to people’s actual lives and one that simply fulfills the needs of the next generation in the workforce.
The warehouse company Rider describes used a model she returns to most often. Rather than arriving at open enrollment to announce a rate increase and call it a day, they brought near-site clinic options and in-house mental health providers directly to their employees. They added services designed to help people manage chronic conditions before those conditions became expensive. “They thought of it as an investment rather than an expense,” Rider said. As philosophies go, it is a pretty good one.
OneDigital has leaned into artificial intelligence and is not apologetic about it. “We have fully embraced AI,” said Rider, pointing to internal tools built for the benefits administration function, with an HR equivalent currently in development. The goal is not to thin headcount. It is to clear the repetitive administrative work so that consultants and account managers can spend more time on the things that actually require critical thinking and complex problem solving.
Carriers are pursuing similar logic with claims processing, and the early results have been a mixed bag. Complex disease management cases that were handled with limited human oversight generated the kind of press coverage nobody wants. Rider is measured but honest about where the technology needs to catch up: “It’s just we have to train the AI tools better,” she said.
She has done more rigorous thinking on this than most. Her published law school paper examined precisely where artificial intelligence introduces discrimination and bias risk under Title VII, and the real-world examples have followed. HRIS systems such as Workday has faced scrutiny for an applicant tracking system that, under certain conditions, rejected technically qualified candidates based on word choice anomalies rather than merit. The bias was unintentional. The consequences were not.
There is also a dimension the tech teams often miss entirely. How people access and engage with healthcare is shaped by culture, language, income, and geography, and AI systems are not consistently built to reflect that. Rider once worked with a client group where a tortilla was understood as a utensil rather than a carbohydrate, a distinction with direct and measurable consequences for blood sugar management. No algorithm caught it. A human who took the time to understand the cultural context did.
If the current moment is about navigating cost and complexity, the next three to five years, in Rider’s view, are about something altogether more interesting.
“Precision medicine is what’s coming next,” she said. A DNA test that maps which medications are likely to work for a specific individual, which might offer partial benefit, and which should be avoided entirely based on genetic makeup. In mental health care, where a prescribing appointment already involves a six to eight week wait, this is not a minor refinement. It is a potential restructuring of how treatment begins. “We have a mental health crisis in this world right now,” said Rider. A system that sends patients through sequential medication trials (based on formulary and step therapy requirements) while in crisis is not a system that is working. Precision medicine offers a way around it, and the cost efficiencies alone should be enough to focus minds. Currently this is not offered main stream.
The second development is food as medicine, and if that phrase makes it sound like a wellness trend, it is worth understanding what Rider actually means. Providers prescribing healthy meals, delivered to a patient’s home as part of a structured care pathway for a specific chronic condition. A warehouse client she worked with before the pandemic adopted the model early, and A1C (average blood sugar) levels fell measurably across their workforce. The effect extended beyond the employees themselves: when one family member changes how they eat, others tend to follow.
The historical barrier was access. Patients who lacked reliable transportation could not always pick up food prescriptions from a central location. Home delivery has largely removed that problem, and some Medicare plans are beginning to offer grocery allowances for nutritious food purchases. “I would say it’s in its infancy,” Rider acknowledged, “but what we’re seeing when people really adhere to these dietary changes” is consistent and encouraging, across heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and patients undergoing chemotherapy.
Rider has her own data point here. An asthmatic since the age of seven, she worked with a functional medicine doctor, discovered that gluten and dairy were driving her inflammation, and removed them. It cost her out of pocket to meet with this provider as they don’t typically accept insurance. Her fully insured plan did not cover the protocol. “It was an investment in my personal health,” she said. The emergency room visits stopped. The medications fell away. She put the savings back into food. The logic is almost offensively simple once you see it. She focuses on eating her rainbow at each meal – high protein with fruit and vegetables.
For someone working a full-time consulting job for a PEO, finishing a law degree, and maintaining a national board position, the question of how Rider actually unwinds feels almost impertinent. She answers it without hesitation.
Audiobooks have replaced physical reading in the interest of efficiency: car journeys are now continuous education, whether that is a podcast or a book. Cooking is the main event at home. Her husband is Mexican-Filipino, and a former Thai exchange student she considers family also influenced her. Indian food features heavily, and a “food as medicine” philosophy has deepened her preference for cooking at home over increasingly expensive restaurants.
Travel is the bigger ritual. A family trip to Japan in 2019 remains the reference point: new foods, new perspectives, a genuine embrace of whatever the culture happens to be rather than a tourist’s surface reading of it. The same approach applies domestically. Chains are skipped. Local restaurants, local history, and local context are sought out instead.
It is, taken together, a portrait of someone who is constitutionally incapable of passivity. Whether that is a feature of the job or the person is probably a chicken-and-egg question. Either way, for the employers and employees navigating a benefits market in genuine upheaval, having someone paying this much attention is not a bad thing.
