The Blueprint for High-Performance Health Benefits with Dave Chase

For our fifth episode, we’re joined by Dave Chase, the founder of Health Rosetta, an organization that promotes proven principles for building high-performance health benefits that cost a lot less than what you might be paying today.

Dave starts by sharing how, after grieving the loss of several friends, he discovered his calling to help change health benefits for the better so that families have affordable access to quality care. Since then he’s done just that for thousands of businesses and their teams through his work at Health Rosetta and their network of benefit advisors. 

Listen in as Dave shares his proven blueprint for high performance health-benefits. He also shares the stunning outcomes businesses all over the U.S. are discovering once they adopt Health Rosetta’s mindset and practices. 

High-performance health benefits aren’t expensive

On the Better Benefits podcast, we’ve spent weeks talking about the high cost of health benefits and the rising cost of the health care service underneath these insurance products. But Dave gives us a different perspective at the very beginning of our conversation. 

Healthcare’s actually not expensive. What’s expensive is profiteering, price gouging, administrative bloat, and outright fraud—and inappropriate treatment in some cases, like the opioid crisis. So the question is how do you do it? You just pay for good care. In fact, we would up the pay of a lot of the best high-value healthcare delivery organizations and individual clinicians.

It sounds simple, but how can businesses approach creating less expensive health benefits?

A new blueprint for high-performance health benefits

Just as the LEED organization created a playbook for environmentally friendly buildings and worked with professional architects, Health Rosetta’s health benefits blueprint was designed to help benefit advisors and their clients re-architect their employee health benefit programs. 

LEED’s guidelines didn’t make legacy buildings green overnight, and for good reason. They weren’t just advising putting out recycle bins in old buildings. Becoming LEED certified is a big change and an investment.

LEED's practices gained popularity in local communities like Portland, Seattle, Boulder, Denver, and Austin—places that really valued taking care of the environment. Similarly, benefit advisors and their clients are catching on to Health Rosetta’s blueprint in local communities across the country that are tired of the high cost of traditional health benefits. 

The blueprint itself begins by creating a transparent relationship between benefits advisors and their clients. Once they’ve established that, the broker gets to work on building a solid foundation of access to quality primary care. From there, they layer on relationships with local hospital systems for more specialized care and pharmacy benefits with competitive prices on prescription medication. Lastly, they create access to other centers of excellence for highly specialized care, such as the Mayo Clinic. 

High-performance health benefits unlock social good

There’s no doubt that re-architecting your company’s health benefits requires an investment of time and energy to build a better set of local relationships with providers who can take care of your team’s health. But done right, the outcomes can be stunning. 

Dave shares the story of Rosen Hotels in the Orlando, FL area. The company redesigned their health benefits some years ago to give their team low cost access to top quality care. This move cumulatively saved $425M over the course of 25 years of success. By reinvesting just 5% of their savings into their local community, they were able to adopt a nearby crime-ridden neighborhood. They invested in kids and education by financing pre-school, daycare, after-school programs, and college tuition. As a result, crime went down 78%, high school graduation rates have gone up to nearly 100%, and Rosen’s team still has one of the best employee health benefits programs in the country. 

Pacific Steel is another company that took the cost of health benefits for 750 employees from $8M down to under $3.5M while benefits improved. As a result of these savings, they have been able to up their investment in their team’s retirement plans. Today, a forklift driver can retire with a 7-figure retirement lump sum. These are the things that become possible when you don’t squander money on overpriced health benefits.

Listen to the full episode to hear more from Dave on the mindset that’s holding employers back and how to overcome this mindset to embrace the changes that could transform your business and your community. 

Dave’s resources

If you’re interested in learning more about the Health Rosetta mindset and strategies to build high-performance health benefits, check out Dave’s books. He has kindly shared a link to his books at www.healthrosetta.org/friends where you can download his books for free (PDF) or find links to purchase at booksellers. During the podcast, we spoke about his latest book—Relocalizing Health: The Future of Health Care is Local, Open, and Independent as well as his earlier book—The CEO’s Guide to Restoring the American Dream.

Other titles that have had a big impact on Dave and his leadership include:

• The Price We Pay by Marty Makary, which outlines the challenges in healthcare
• The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday, for inspiration on navigating life’s challenges with the wisdom of the ancient Stoics 

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