The Story of BenefitsDNA | Stories With Traction Podcast

EPISODE MENTIONED IN INTRO: The Importance of Learning Tours with Kirsten Yurich.


PODCAST SUMMARY: In this episode, Justin Leader and Matt Zaun talk about the healthcare industry and why Justin founded BenefitsDNA.

JUSTIN LEADER BIO: Justin is the President and Founding Partner of BenefitsDNA.

For more info, check out Justin here |
https://www.linkedin.com/in/justindonaldleader/
https://benefitsdna.com/
http://wefixyourhealthcare.com/


MATT ZAUN BIO: Matt is an award-winning speaker and storyteller who empowers organizations to attract more clients through the art of strategic storytelling. Matt’s past engagements have catalyzed radical sales increases for over 300 organizations that range from financial institutions to the health and wellness industry.

Matt shares his expertise in persuasion with executives, sales professionals, and entrepreneurs, who he coaches on the art of influence and how to leverage this for profits and impact.

For more info, check out Matt Zaun HERE. 

 

*Below is an AI-generated transcript, which may contain errors.

 

Matt Zaun 

Back in June, I had a conversation with Kirsten Yurek. was episode 7. 24 titled The Importance of Learning Tours.

For anyone that did not listen to this episode, I will include it in the show notes. It's a great episode regarding company culture through listening.

Toward the end of that episode, I had asked Kirsten, is there anyone that you can point to that exemplifies what you said?

And she mentioned a gentleman by the name of Justin Leader. I'm excited for today's episode because today I'm joined by Justin Leader, who is the president and founding partner of Benefit's DNA.

 

Justin Leader (Benefitsdna)

Welcome to the show, Justin. Hey, thank you very much. I'm honored to be here and thankful that Kirsten brought me up.

 

Matt Zaun 

So she did a lot of good things to say about you. One of the things she mentioned is you as a leader, different things that you've done, and the founding of your company.

So I want to get into the start of your company, what prompted you going into that world? Can you share the origin story of Benefit's DNA with us?

 

Justin Leader (Benefitsdna)

Yeah, I'd love to, and all the nice things she said that tells me that my check cleared.

 

Matt Zaun

So thank you, Kirsten out there.

 

Justin Leader (Benefitsdna)

You know, I've always been a little scrappy. I think I'm a survivor by nature. And for me, I don't know if it's the punk rock in me, but I've just always had that question in my mind is what I'm being told accurate, as well as challenging the status quo.

So I never really understood where that would fit in from a career perspective. And being the first person in my family to actually go and get a college education, I had no idea where I fit in in this whole journey that we're all on.

I worked for a major pharmaceutical company. worked for a major bank. then I met a gentleman who was a high network guy who I knew a little bit about, knew a little bit about my background at he.

He said to me, goes, kid, he goes, I know a little bit about you, your story. I'm not going to give you my money at the time I was working for a wealth management firm, but I want to teach him my business because I think he'd be really good at it.

So I got introduced to the employee benefits industry and the insurance industry and having a little bit of a science background.

I really fell in love with the healthcare health insurance conundrum that we all face. In the United States and specifically the uniquely American fact that we spend more than any other developed nation on healthcare, we're ranked in the mid 30s for quality outcomes.

And out of the $4.3 trillion in spend, 1.3 comes from employers and their employees in the funding healthcare in our country.

So for me, I was encouraged by this mentor who I will I loved this day to go out on my own eventually.

I founded Benefit's DNA with the understanding that every employer we touch has their own unique DNA, their own specific financial needs, their own cultural issues, what have you.

So I set forth in 2014 to move forward in building not only a unique value proposition, but also a culture that I could get behind.

And I can get into that a little bit more, but really the genesis was just around challenging what I saw as everything that was wrong with how healthcare was being delivered and the confusion between two things, healthcare and health insurance and how we throw those two together, ball it up and deliver it to the marketplace.

 

Matt Zaun 

So there's a lot to unpack with what you said. I do want to zone in on the mentorship piece.

One of the things that I've been fascinated with when it comes to the business world is how many high achievers really do have humility.

It of blew me away because my background is the political arena. I've worked with a lot of politicians and unfortunately a lot of them have massive egos.

when I went into the business world, I was stunned that you have some extremely successful business individuals that are very humble.

So I want to talk about that about your willingness to listen to mentorship to get to where you are.

So can you speak to the importance of mentorship before we dive into more of the specifics regarding healthcare?

 

Justin Leader (Benefitsdna)

I would love to. So I owe a lot to the folks that have helped me along the way. If I rewind back to when I was born, my mother was 18 years old.

She doesn't know who my father is and right around the age of two, it became too much for her.

And I was very close to ending up in four I ended up getting adopted by her father, my grandfather, and his mother, my great-grandmother.

So, from an early age, I had a lot of wisdom that was passed down. Specifically from folks, my great-grandmother never went to high school, and my grandfather who never graduated high school.

And I got very used to hearing the same story told to me at least two dozen times with the generation.

But my grandfather instilled in me a couple things outside of my namesake. One of them being, always listened to those who have been down the path before you.

And I latched onto that, and I can think of number of father figures outside of him who were willing to give me the time and attention to help keep me on the right path.

Find you. There's a lot of folks in my family and outside of my family that come from broken homes and not the best situation who makes some really bad choices.

And I've not always made the best choices. I'm not without sin as that goes, but I've had people that generally speaking were willing to offer their time as well as their advice based on their experience and that's been invaluable.

Three, four months ago, I was going through some of my grandfather's items in a box that I kept after he had passed away.

I took care of his mother with him between the age of 11 and 14, and then I took care of my grandfather as my career was getting started the last three years of his life.

But I kept the box of name sakes and I found something recently. It was a pin that he wore on his hat that said leaders never quit.

I thought about that. I thought about my upbringing, the fact that we didn't have I have a whole lot of money.

I was on Medicaid. We were on welfare. My grandfather lost our family home. I see your high school and we moved into a trailer that we rented.

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow.

 

Justin Leader (Benefitsdna)

But he wore this pin on his hat. And he maybe he was stubborn. Maybe he was bullheaded. But I loved finding this pin so much that I went out and got a couple hundred of them made.

And on my hardest days over the past few months, I have been running. Writing and written notes with a little story regarding that pin and sending them out to people that have been a mentor that I admire that inspire me.

I have a lot of people to thank. I broke a cycle that is not easy to break. I have a beautiful family.

I have two young sons where I get to be actively engaged as a father for them. And I would not be here without those mentors, but it goes beyond that because in that note, I talk about helping the people.

Who are now behind me. And it's not only important to focus on having mentors in many aspects of your life that may be older than you, but also mentoring or getting mentorship, I should say, from those that are younger.

So I even look at the youngest guy on my team. I learn so much from him every day. He can help me be a better leader.

So I think having a mentor or mentors is vital to your success if you have the self-awareness to understand what they're trying to do, but at the end of the day, you still have to make your own decisions and fail your way to success, if you will.

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow, so that is a powerful story. thank you so much for sharing that. very much appreciate it. So this is something that I refer to as a signature story.

It's part of what makes us us. And it's amazing how powerful story like that can be. You continue to tell yourself that story.

to inspire you to help other people. So I want to talk about the importance of empathy, because it really brings out the aspect of empathy to me.

So my grandmother had the most amount of empathy I've ever seen in another human being. Okay, so my grandmother lived through the Great Depression and I was bewildered with her ability to connect with anyone.

It didn't matter if the person was a janitor or a CEO of a massive organization. My grandmother had this ability to connect because she had gone through so much financial hardship during the Great Depression that it enabled her to connect with others pain.

So as I'm listening to your story, I'm hearing you went through an aspect of pain. You mentioned in the beginning, you said you're a survivor by nature.

So how did that influence you to understand that what you're doing with benefits DNA is helping others that might have

Have you ever thought about it from an empathy perspective regarding that story?

 

Justin Leader (Benefitsdna)

think things escalated for me around the age of six. I had gone to live with my mother in another state and she was on her second marriage and it was unbeknownst to my grandfather and my great-grandmother, not a good situation, despite of what it looked like on the outside.

I saw lot of abuse, I saw sexual abuse, it was a really rough year. But thank God for my grandfather and my aunt who came to visit me and they could tell something was wrong.

My grandfather said at the time he still had custody of me, Justin, do you want to come back and live with me?

And at six years old I said yes. And I did. For me, as almost way of protecting myself in self-preservation, I need to understand somebody's intent.

And the only common denominator in certain situations is time to understand somebody's intent. But I found that if I can connect with the good in people and what motivates them, what inspires them, what drives them, I can understand how, A, I can help them, but in turn with that connection a lot of people have helped me.

It's therapeutic. It also creates a bond. And I will forever be a relationship guy. You could ask my wife, I like long-term relationships.

And those relationships have to be built on a foundation, in my opinion, of Honestly, trust and communication. if you don't have one of those blocks, the foundation is shaking.

So for me, being able to connect and understand what is going on in somebody's life personally or professionally means a lot to me and I take that seriously.

Especially when somebody like yourself opens up and shares a piece of their past and who they are. From a benefits DNA perspective, for our mission, we want to change the very fabric of healthcare and health insurance delivery.

For us in this country, it's a very opaque system. Everybody struggles and I'll share with you a story of why I'm so driven.

When worked at a Denny's as a waitress for 30 years off the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Bedford, Pennsylvania. She, like many folks, didn't have a salary.

She was reliant on tips and hourly work. She also needed her hours. So when her employer got advice that they needed to institute a high deductible health plan to drive consumerism, but also save money, it was detrimental to her and many other what I call the Alice demographic asset limited income constrained yet employed populations that exist in this country, who have a job, but they can barely make ends meet.

Whether it be daycare, their mortgage, groceries, bills, So over the course of a year and a half, two years, she couldn't afford time off work or her out of pocket expenses.

Having a high deductible health plan in many cases, it's like giving somebody peace to the helicopter, but people don't know how to fly it.

They don't know how to navigate the system. So I get a call from her and she says, this is after she collapsed at work and got taken the hospital.

She says, Judd, which was my nickname, I just got diagnosed with stage four cervical cancer. How can I afford this?

Not how can I beat this, but how can I afford this? So as the resident health care guy for the family took a step back and I'm like, we have such a greater purpose here.

She had no idea that at every not-for-profit hospital in the United States, because of her demographic, regardless of insured status, she's eligible for no-cost care.

She could have been going to the doctor and avoiding out-of-pocket expenses, but her plan and her perception limited her from doing that.

There's personal responsibility I get at, but she died a few years later, and I think about her all the time and what we're doing when we're talking to employers or we're challenging the system or we're working on getting certain laws passed like the hospital transparency, the law that passed a few years back that I had some involvement in.

And the struggle that continues where only 38% of hospitals in the this country are compliant. I'm with posting their prices from a transparency perspective.

Why? Because the fines are relatively low. What's a few million dollars when you're making tens of millions, but keeping things completely opaque?

So for me, I feel the pain of employers with their second largest overhead expense. I go into these meetings and I see their people that are struggling.

And year after year, they're given crappy option A and crappy option B. I feel that pain. I feel the struggle.

So for my team, I've looked to collect like-minded people who are empathetic. then what a novel concept. Show them appreciation.

Provide them with the purpose. Compensate them accordingly. And let's go out and let's make a difference. And that seemed to work very well for us.

 

Matt Zaun

So thank you for sharing the story of your and. Well, it brings up in my mind that we, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels to me like we don't really have healthcare.

And the States. A sick care, right? We're trying to manage sickness, but we don't only have a health care system.

 

Justin Leader (Benefitsdna)

Would you agree with that statement? 100%. That health, looking at it from a sick care system perspective, it's extremely profitable.

And we could change the way that we provide health care, but more so how we fund it. And I get this question all the time.

Is it a Medicare for all system or is it a current system that we have? And my answer is regardless of which direction we go in, unless we have transparency and understand what the heck we're paying for and what value we're receiving in return, either system fails, either death by taxes, or we continue to flush trillions of dollars down the drain every single year with fraud, waste, And abuse.

 

Matt Zaun 

Still, how can a country... He that is as wealthy as the United States without going into specific policies or politicians, but I just kind of lay it out there is how can a country that is so wealthy like the United States we have an aging population so clearly this is going to be an issue decades into the future.

How could we allow the quote unquote I'm using air quotes healthcare system to be so inflated when it comes to budgetary expenses so give me some help here as far as where we are.

How do we get to this point?

 

Justin Leader (Benefitsdna)

Maybe some things that we could do going forward. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, yeah. So this is like for what we do these are very exciting times because there's a lot of changes that have come that not a lot of folks know about from a legal perspective and I'll touch on that because I think it's really important for folks to know what's going on.

I think part of the issue is we've constructed, let me take a step back. Here's my disclaimer. I am not anti any aspect of the health insurance or healthcare industrial complex in the United States.

I think what we've done is built a really, really good system at extracting dollars without providing much value back.

And if you look at the publicly traded stock price of any of these healthcare companies, most of them have returned at least two and half times the Dow Jones Industrial Average returns since the financial collapse.

So they're making a lot of money. But you and I and everybody else, I think, is still as lost and struggling to understand where the value is coming from.

The Department of Labor and the government finally started to realize we need to stop this existential bleed that is impacting everybody.

As Warren Buffett said, the US healthcare system is a tapeworm. Mid-size employers, especially small employers too, are struggling to make ends meet with what they feel is every year unreasonable rises in their health insurance premium.

There's a number of reasons for this, but the biggest one that I am going to harp on is the lack of transparency and understanding what is actually going on within the plan that's driving costs.

In most cases, this information has been held as proprietary. You have high claimants on your plan. It's trend. Health care, hospital, building charges, they're expensive.

there's a law passed December 27th of 2020 called the Consolidated Appropriations Act that I'm asked to speak on along with some attorneys that I work with.

I'm not an attorney at all, but very passionate about these laws because they're driving costs. A Shifting of Health Insurance to the Employee.

Going back to the Consolidated Appropriations Act, think the three things that you're folks that may be listening that are now planned fiduciaries, they have now been deemed by ERISA as a planned fiduciary for health plans, just like the 401k and pension side.

They need to be aware that there's certain prescription drug reporting that's required for the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Labor.

There are attestations that they have to do every year now that says none of the contract size sign for my health plan contain gag clauses that prevent me from getting cost quality and utilization information.

And oh, by the way, I now have to go to each of these vendors and ask them not only what are you getting paid directly, but massive amounts of indirect compensation that's getting paid to these folks or the advice that they're giving in the vendors that they're providing.

As a solution or ongoing. It's a big wake-up call for a lot of folks and there is litigation out there that is increasing week by week.

And one of my clients is leading the charge, labor fund in Connecticut, where for the better part of six years they've bled anywhere from $100,000 to $2 million a year out of their fund.

And by leveraging transparency and doing the right thing as a fiduciary, I just got a text from them. We're looking at not only $1.1 million that we had projected, but we're moving to $1.5 million that we're returning back to that fund this year with no out-of-pocket expenses or in-network out of networks $250.

So that's long-winded to say there are a lot of rules and regulations that aren't being talked about by, I'd say, most of the industry because it impacts their bottom line substantially, but we're moving towards a value-based system as opposed to a fee-based system.

And things have a... there's hope. I'd like to think that there's hope for us to correct the Titanic before it's too late, and we've completely sunk.

But unfortunately for folks like Miami and many others who are in collections, who are afraid to go to the doctor because they can't take time off work, this is still a nightmare that they're living, but we're trying to fix.

 

Matt Zaun 

So using the analogy of a ship sinking based on your experience, what would that time frame be? the end of this decade, by the end of the 30s, by what time frame?

If nothing changes and everything stays as is, when does that ship sink?

 

Justin Leader (Benefitsdna)

Ballpark, just estimate. would you say? It's in the big short, right?

 

Matt Zaun 

I have. Fortunately or unfortunately I have.

 

Justin Leader (Benefitsdna)

I have a little bit of a target on my back because I'm not going to stop championing these rules and helping people leverage what I feel are consumer-leverage.

The only tools are the only defense they have to. I think are some of the biggest consumer protection violations that have ever occurred in our country.

I can safely say that if things do not improve substantially and we don't write this ship by 2030, we are going to be in dire straits.

The good news is we have a couple things. I mentioned the litigation that we have. Heinz Kraft is litigating Etna.

There are now plaintiffs, attorneys coming out seeking volunteers to go against their employer, which is scary to understand what's going on in their health plan from an excess fee perspective.

I hate to say it where laws fail We're regarding it enforcement and there is enforcement coming. Litigation may prevail.

If the litigation prevails and some things are solidified in the form of penalties with what we have going on out there, we'll probably expedite these fixes.

My fear is things will get drug out. DOL will not enforce things to the level that they need to.

And we hit some serious roadblocks and things. The DOL the flip side. I mentioned publicly traded companies that have massive profits, even not-for-profit entities that don't deliver enough care back to the community if you think of not-for-profit hospitals to justify their not paying city, federal, property tax.

There was an article that said there was a $24 billion gap between what hospitals hospitals were writing on. If things change too quickly, the market could collapse.

I'll have a big short because of the foundation being ripped out from underneath it.

 

Matt Zaun 

We'll put them in the positive category, the value of v. there is incremental positive change, how optimistic are you going into the future?

you say that you have a sense of optimism where we'd be headed based on these changes?

 

Justin Leader (Benefitsdna)

Absolutely. And I see it on the faces of folks that actually are enjoying it. Matt Green, Matt Z Well, I'm sure you have a four-year-old and 15-month-old that's still in diapers.

Zaun, the right. So so riddle me this, if I have a health plan where I have a bunch of people that are delivering babies and I have two hospital systems that they're going to, both of them have the same quality outcomes, but one is thousands of dollars lower cost for labor and delivery.

By all means, these mamas can go to either hospital, but one of the most creative things I've seen is incentivizing your folks by saying if you go to hospital A, which has the same quality outcomes, but substantially lower cost for

Our plan, and in turn you, we're going to wave any out-of-pocket expense that you have for that visit. And oh, by the way, when your baby gets here, we're going to give you free diapers and wipes for two years.

Because the deltas so large, you're helping us and helping yourself. We're going to reward you for that. And there are so many creative ways that you can do that within a plan to help people.

That's what I love. I love seeing that impact where people go in and get a procedure and they're like, I didn't pay anything out of pocket and I had a great experience.

That's possible and I think that's where we're seeing the greatest success stories. And we're also having the Ted Lasso effect when people get called to the table and they're like, this has existed not just for a few years, but information has been trickling out regarding what could be done for the better part of six or seven years.

 

Matt Zaun 

Why haven't you told me? Wow. That's very creative and very interesting. appreciate you sharing that. And I also appreciate your time today.

Thank you so much for this conversation. It was very insightful, fascinating, really. You're throwing out a lot of statistics I'd never heard of before.

very intriguing. There's three things in particular, though, that I got from this conversation. The very first thing is I appreciate you mentioning that you were a survivor by nature.

And I appreciate you mentioning that you were almost in foster care. And due to a series of events and part of your story, you were able to overcome that.

That is incredible. The second piece is you said you need to understand someone's intent. And you mentioned when you were six, you had to decide where you were going to go.

I can't even imagine that having a five-year-old having, you know, my youngest son decide where he's going to live the rest of his life.

Or at least his childhood into his teen years. I couldn't even imagine that. So even from an early age, you needed to understand someone's intent.

was a very powerful thing that I heard you say. the third and final piece is I appreciate you sharing some optimism with us today.

A lot of times when people talk about the healthcare industry, it's always gloom and doom, which we touched on that piece.

But I really appreciate you mentioning that there are different things that are happening that lead you to be optimistic and have hope.

So I appreciate those three things. I very much do. Now, if anyone wants to get more information on you or benefits DNA, where's the best place they can go to get that information?

 

Justin Leader (Benefitsdna)

Yeah, I'm easy to find on LinkedIn as well as benefitsDNA.com and we fix your healthcare.com.

 

Matt Zaun 

Perfect. I will include that in the show notes. People just click and go right there.

 

Justin Leader (Benefitsdna)

But again, Justin, thank you so much for your time today. It's a pleasure, Matt. Thank you for letting me tell my story.