Health benefits, rebuilt from the renewal up.
Montreut is a health benefits advisor for employers. We design your plan, negotiate your coverage, and run it day to day on software we built.
What we do
Taking your plan to market once a year is the smallest part of the job. Through the year we help you understand your risk and weigh the alternatives, and we run the plan day to day.
Benefits strategy
The plan designed around your workforce, your budget, and what you are trying to achieve.
Medical and pharmacy
Carriers, networks, PBMs, and cost management evaluated, then negotiated.
Funding strategy
Fully insured, level-funded, self-funded, or captive. We work out which fits and model each.
Medical stop-loss
Protection against catastrophic claims, placed with markets most advisors cannot access.
Ancillary benefits
Dental, vision, life, disability, and voluntary benefits, placed and managed together.
Benefits administration
Enrollment, member questions, claims problems, and filings, run on MontreutOS.
Costs are rising faster than they have in twenty years
Employers expect the cost of health benefits per employee to rise 8.2% in 2027, the biggest increase since 2003. For most companies that number arrives as a renewal letter in the fourth quarter, with a few weeks to respond.
Annual change in employer health benefit cost per employee: 3.4% in 2020, 6.3% in 2021, 3.2% in 2022, 5.2% in 2023, 4.5% in 2024, 6.0% in 2025, 6.7% projected for 2026, and 8.2% projected for 2027. Cumulative since 2019: 52.6% by 2027.
Annual change in total health benefit cost per employee. Mercer, National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans, 2020 to 2025; 2026 and 2027 are employer projections from Mercer (Nov 2025) and Marsh (Sept 2026). The cumulative view compounds those rates.
Who we work with
- Employers with 50 to 5,000 employees
- Family-owned and founder-led companies
- Professional firms and nonprofits
- Municipalities and public entities
- Community health centers and provider groups
- Associations and affinity groups
The software behind every account
Every quote, contract, renewal, and member question runs through MontreutOS, the system we built to run accounts. Below is a renewal worked from your own numbers. Move the sliders.
- Current annual premium$4,811,000
- Carrier's proposalTrend assumption 11.0% against a national projection of 8.2%$5,359,000
- Our counterAt 4.9% with no plan changes$5,047,000
- Self-funded with stop-lossExpected cost, $175,000 specific attachment$4,378,000
Illustrative. The relationships between the options reflect typical outcomes and will differ for a real group.
TrendThe carrier assumed 11.0% medical trend. The national projection for 2027 is 8.2%. For this group the gap is worth about $154,000 a year, so we ask for the claims basis.
FeesA network access fee of $4.10 per employee per month was added this year, about $17,000 at current enrollment. It was not in last year's contract.
AlternativesFour options at matching benefits, checked for deductibles, networks, and formularies. Worst case on the self-funded option is $4,984,000, still 7% under the carrier's proposal.
Send us your renewal
We will review it and tell you what we would change.
Send your current plan summary and, when it arrives, the renewal notice. Within five business days an advisor comes back with a written review: where the numbers come from, what the alternatives look like, and what we would push back on.