Tuesday Morning With Justin: Healthcare, Leadership & Life
Tuesday Morning With Justin: Healthcare, Leadership & Life
The Healthcare Quarterback: Putting Your Benefit Puzzle Together
Listener Question: "What do you actually do?"
Ever wondered what a benefit advisor actually does? It's a question that prompted Justin Futrell to peel back the curtain on his role at True North Companies in this enlightening episode.
While placing health insurance represents the foundation of Justin's work—accounting for roughly 80% of his focus to match the proportion of employee benefits spending—the real value comes through strategic customization. "Candidly, you could spend a hundred bucks, study a few hours and pass the test to be able to sell health insurance," Justin reveals. The true expertise emerges when tailoring comprehensive solutions to each company's specific cultural and economic objectives.
The episode highlights a startling workplace reality: 80% of employees worry about personal finances during work hours, losing approximately 36 hours of productivity annually per employee. With nearly half of Americans struggling with medical debt, Justin explains how innovative approaches to healthcare benefits can address these financial stressors. By functioning as a "healthcare quarterback," he helps companies provide employees with genuine choices beyond traditional healthcare pathways, where patients typically follow provider recommendations without questioning costs or comparing quality metrics.
Through real-world examples—including a nonprofit struggling to recruit tech talent despite budget limitations—Justin demonstrates how thoughtful benefits design can solve complex organizational challenges. The benefit advisor role has evolved far beyond simple insurance placement into strategic partnership that aligns employee wellbeing with company objectives.
Have questions about optimizing your company's benefits strategy? Drop them in the chat, and Justin might address them in an upcoming episode. Your organization's unique challenges deserve a customized approach that considers both economic realities and cultural goals.
Music by Alex Lambert.
Contact Justin via text 740-525-5259 or via email JFutrell@TrueNorthCompanies.com
I welcome the opportunity to hear your feedback from this episode!
Thanks again to my musically gifted friend Alex Lambert for the music. Also thanks to Kevin Asehan for the edits.
Welcome to another Tuesday morning with Justin. I'm Justin Futrell, benefit Advisor at True North Companies, and today I want to read a question that we got from a listener, and that is Justin, you seem knowledgeable about healthcare, but what do you actually do? And I got a chuckle out of that and I can appreciate that. I would say that 80% of what I do is resolved around healthcare, and that's because probably 80% or more of the spend within an employee benefits program is healthcare, health insurance. So, yes, we help place health insurance, but that's the very most basic thing that we do. Candidly, you could spend a hundred bucks, study a few hours and pass the test to be able to sell health insurance. What makes our team unique is thinking about how we can tailor everything possible to the specific cultural and economic goals of our client of a certain company. So with that, I get to work with CFOs, chief financial officers and HR leaders in figuring out how to deploy the best technology during open enrollment so that you have a good experience. Thinking about what benefits we're offering, yes, but also what challenges are we facing?
Speaker 1:I'm looking at an article from the Leader's Edge, which is in the employee benefits industry, and there is a quote here that says 80% of employees worry about finances, their personal finances, during work hours and the average employee spends more than three hours of work per month on personal finance issues. Three hours a month, 12 months a year, that's 36 hours of wasted time, and I'm not kidding. Just three days ago my colleague Deborah started walking out on a Thursday afternoon. We were like what are you doing? And she's always the first one in and quite often the last one out. She's a baby boomer and she works hard. She's one of she's probably in the 99th percentile of the hardest working people at our company. The point is, she said I'm taking the afternoon off to get up, to make calls, to get appointments set up and figure out a few things personally, when I'm in the office I work. She said that because someone was like why don't you just make the calls over lunch? And she said when I'm in the office I work, I don't use my cell phone.
Speaker 1:Not everyone has that philosophy. So if it's true, the 80% of employees worry about their personal finances and waste about three hours a month during work time, what can we do to help offset that? Well, my head goes to the healthcare system. I want to say 50% of people, I'll have to find the stat and I'll correct it if it's wrong. Every other person has medical debt of some extent. That's insane. So, yeah, how do we help solve the medical debt?
Speaker 1:Well, that goes into what we've talked about in previous weeks, in giving consumers you and me options for the first time when it comes to healthcare. All we've ever known is go to our family doctor or go to urgent care, and wherever they tell us to go, we go. We don't think about it. If we end up in the emergency room somewhere, we end up getting submitted to inpatient in that hospital. We end up almost always staying within that healthcare system without having any idea how much it's going to cost and, more importantly, what kind of quality are we talking? Is that health system the best at that procedure? Is that health system the best at not having complications with whatever's going on with you? So just some things to think about. That's what's fun for me.
Speaker 1:How do we create a puzzle? How do we put puzzle pieces together? I'm almost like the quarterback of the team. It's my chance to make up for those days when I was a bad quarterback in high school. Anyway, we get to put the puzzle pieces together. What's what economic and cultural goals do you have at your company and how do we make that work? That's what I love getting to do and how do we make that work. That's what I love getting to do. Last thought. I was on a call last week with a nonprofit in Arkansas and they said we need to figure out how to hire more tech workers with tech talent and we can't compete with the money, but we've got better work-life balance, so how can you help us lean into that? And then we'd go from there, brainstorm, figure out what's best. All right, gang, always feel free to drop a question in the chat, see ya.
