If you want to understand why an increasing number of mid-market employers are walking away from traditional health insurance, Jason Nordby (pictured) can give you the numbers. Groups enrolled in captive benefit plans at M3 Insurance are outperforming their fully insured and self-funded counterparts by approximately 7 percentage points, according to internal performance data shared by M3 leadership. In a hard market that shows no sign of softening, that gap is starting to matter a great deal. For Nordby, M3 Insurance’s Director of Captives, it is less a surprise than a vindication.
Nobody grows up dreaming of insurance. Nordby will be the first to tell you that. He graduated from college, took a role within a healthcare system, and was working toward his master’s degree in the evenings when a chance connection changed everything. A nurse colleague had a brother who was an executive at UnitedHealthcare, one of the largest health insurers in the United States. Rather than writing a thesis paper, Nordby spent time working across UnitedHealthcare’s different departments as a practical substitute for academic research. When it was over, they offered him a job.
He moved into provider contracting and relations, eventually leading that function at a smaller insurer before the company was acquired. He then joined a coalition of employers working to reduce the cost of healthcare and it was there, calling on brokers to recruit their clients, that the path to M3 began.
“One of the brokers I was calling on was evolving from his role as a broker to becoming the President of M3 Insurance,” Nordby said. “He had this vision of hiring a bunch of young, energetic people to grow out his team.”
When Nordby arrived, M3 had around 50 employees. Today, the number is north of 500, organic growth driven not by acquisition but by the kind of patient, culture-led talent development that Nordby now champions himself. “People, culture, that’s not just a motto that we say,” he said. “That’s a motto that we live by.”
After approximately 20 years in the health benefits space, Nordby watched captives emerge, accelerated by the pressures of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as a genuine alternative to a binary mid-market choice: fully insured or individually self-funded.
The problem with traditional insurance, as he saw it firsthand, was structural. Groups that ran well and made money for their insurer year after year were still placed into shared risk pools that increased at the rate of healthcare trend. When a bad year finally came, the protection they had been promised rarely materialized.
“I would see these groups that made money for the insurance company four years in a row and still taking nominal increases, thinking that when they have that bad year, they were going to be protected,” Nordby said. “But when they would have that bad year, they would still get the massive increases.”
Captives changed the equation. They offer employers the transparency and strategic control of self-funding, access to claims data, the ability to deploy point solutions, freedom from the traditional risk pool, while sharing large claims across a cleaner, more cohesive group of like-minded employers.
The insulation matters most right now. A post-COVID double effect has created what Nordby describes as a hard insurance market: during the pandemic, healthcare underutilization led insurers to under-project future claims, while healthcare systems simultaneously raised prices to recover lost revenue. The correction, playing out over the past 18 to 24 months, has been sharp for traditionally insured groups. The Department of Labor’s (DOL) Employee Benefits Security Administration has flagged rising plan costs as a key concern for employer-sponsored coverage in guidance published this year, available at the DOL’s employee benefits newsroom.
For captive members, however, the impact has been far less severe.
“Because the captive model itself is creating its own unique, cleaner risk pool, it is not susceptible to the market dynamics that are happening in that hard market,” Nordby said. “Our groups within captives are outperforming our traditional insurance groups, whether that’s fully insured or self-funded, by about 7 points.”
On a $1 million annual health spend for a 100-person group, the compounding effect of that differential represents significant savings over time and it is widening.
The conventional anxiety in brokerage circles is that artificial intelligence will erode the broker’s value. Nordby does not buy it.
“I think there’s possibly a false belief in the marketplace that because of AI, the value of the broker is going to go away,” he said. “I would actually say it’s the opposite. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity for the people that do it right.”
M3 responded by building from within, launching a dedicated internal AI company and developing a platform called BrokerPRO, designed not simply to automate back-office tasks but to surface strategic insight for clients. A core use case is benefits total rewards benchmarking: giving employers, for the first time, a clear picture of how their benefit plans compare to those of neighboring competitors in the same labor market.
“Most groups don’t really know how their benefit plans stack up to the neighboring benefit plans,” Nordby said. “If we can show them where they’re falling short, where they’re maybe spending too much money and right-size that, they are going to be able to deploy their resources to the right places, which is ultimately going to help them attract and retain employees.”
Health insurance is typically a group’s second largest spend behind payroll. For Nordby, the broker’s role has evolved from annual renewal management into something far more strategic – and it is covered in depth in our feature on how the benefits advisor role is changing in the current US market.
The trend Nordby watches most closely is prescription drug spend. When he started at M3 in 2003, seeing a high-cost specialty drug on a client’s plan was extraordinary. Today, he walks into every prospective client meeting expecting to find several.
The solution, he argues, lies in transparent pass-through pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), entities structured to leverage patient assistance programs, manufacturer support, and international drug sourcing to dramatically reduce cost. A drug carrying an approximately $100,000 annual price tag can often have that expense significantly reduced while the patient continues receiving it uninterrupted.
“That poor employee who’s on that high-cost drug is going from maxing their plan out-of-pocket costs in the first month of the plan year to potentially having no out-of-pocket cost,” Nordby said. “And what do you think that does for culture and for attraction and retention?”
Cancer is the other defining challenge. At a presentation to the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce Association during the summer of 2026, attended by approximately 35 senior human resources professionals, Nordby asked the room to raise their hand if they did not currently have an active cancer case within their plan. Not a single hand went up.
Managing cancer effectively, he emphasizes, requires specialist vendor partners with expertise across cancer types. General providers, however capable, typically lack the granularity to differentiate treatment protocols across subtypes, leading to wasted care and worse outcomes. Guidance from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on cancer-related coverage requirements under the ACA is available at the CMS health insurance market reforms page.
The next 3 to 5 years, Nordby believes, will favor firms like M3 over private equity-backed consolidators. Business owners and CFOs have reached a breaking point with traditional models, and appetite for alternatives, captives, direct primary care, virtual care, mental health solutions is building. Meanwhile, consolidation is squeezing internal resources at larger brokerages, sending experienced consultants in search of something different.
“We’ve had very high-level executive consultants who 10 years ago would have never considered leaving their organization and coming to M3,” Nordby said. “They’ve seen the M3 model, how we are not driven by revenue goals to some shareholders that have nothing to do with our business. We are reinvesting our revenue into the appropriate resources to better serve our clients.”
Away from the office, Nordby is a man of deliberate rituals. There is the Big Green Egg, a ceramic smoker he’s been known to fire up for an all-day pulled pork session, much to his wife’s resigned amusement. There is golf, which doubles as some of the most reliable quality time he gets with his eldest son, a senior in high school who is considering playing at the college level. And there is pickleball, taken up somewhat reluctantly during COVID after his wife dragged him to a tournament and which quickly became a near-obsession after he discovered he wasn’t as unbeatable as he’d assumed.
But the ritual that means the most to him is simpler than any of that.
“There is nothing better than going into the woods, sitting up in a tree stand twenty feet above the ground, taking in all the fall colors and the smells, and seeing just nature around you,” Nordby said. “It’s like just getting away from everything.”
For someone who has spent over three decades navigating the most complex corners of the US group benefits market, getting away from everything is probably well earned.
