2023 BEN Talks: The future of benefits

Sims Tillirson of Alight got real with the audience, diving deep into why mental wellness is important to employees by sharing his personal experiences. “My mental health journey really starts when I’m 21 years old,” Tillirson said. He took the audience to Clinton, South Carolina, where he found out he was getting kicked out of college for the second time, and begins to think his life is over.

“A wave comes over me, and a horrible, horrible memory hits my brain,” he said, revealing to the audience that he was sexually assaulted as a boy by a member of his family. “That hurt me deep. But, I didn’t do anything healthy about it. I called my drug dealer, I went and bought an eight-ball of cocaine and a case a beer, and then I went to drink to forget for a while.”

Tillirson explaied that this pattern repeated itself frequently over the next six years, even into his benefits career. as he continued to struggle with drug and alcohol use, anxiety and depression, and a debilitating back injury that started his use of painkillers. “This allowed me to push down all these bad experiences and anxiety and never really deal with it.”

Now four and a half years sober, Tillirson shared his coping mechanisms, which included therapy, (too much of) the gym and serving as a worship pastor. But all of this could only help so much. What he really needed was the right mental health diagnosis. Eventually, Tillirson was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which changed the course of his treatment and life.

“Thankfully, now I deal with things a little better; I have a nice plan in place,” Tillirson said. “I microdose psilocybin pretty frequently to help with my PTSD; I use cannabis to help and I am medicated daily. He said he shares his experience to let people know that mental health doesn’t have to be taboo. It is something that a lot of people struggle with, so its vitally important to let peers and employees know that there are solutions, and that they are not alone in trying to find the solutions.

To conclude his BEN Talk, Tillirson offered “a few of the trends I am very excited about when we think about the future of mental wellness:”

1. “The willingness of C-suite leaders and executive team members to talk about what’s happening.” Tillirson said he puts his therapy appointments into his group calendar so his coworkers know that it’s OK to talk about and go to therapy.
2. “We’ve graduated from the crappy EAPs that are embedded in life insurance plans and some of the BUCAH plans. We have boutique EAPs and robust mental health solutions, and finance teams are willing to pay for it.”
3. “We are starting to see TPAs and vendors venture into the psychedelic care space, which is a new frontier for us, but it is a way for us to walk back what the pharmaceutical industry has done to us.”

Focusing on the next step

Elsa Glorioso of PeopleStrategy didn’t start out in the benefits industry. She graduated college and became an oncology nurse, got married, had a beautiful daughter and thought she had it all figured out. That was until her husband left and she became a single mom overnight.

“I had to do what I hate to do and be vulnerable,” she said. Glorioso called her parents and explained how everything fell apart, but she still knew what kind of life she wanted to give her daughter, which meant she had to keep going.

Glorioso shared a story about administering blood to a cancer patient. Everything was going well until the patient asked if Glorioso was OK. She broke down and filled the patient in on everything happening in her life. The patient responded, “You know I have cancer, right?”

Glorioso laughs and continues to talk to the patient about their life. Outside of the hospital, the woman was a successful market president. Then the patient said, “I don’t know if I’m going to make it out of here, but if I do and you decide to put on your big girl panties, give me a call.” 

This got Glorioso thinking about why she became a nurse in the first place.

She then jumped back to when she was 14 and had a seizure, which resulted in the need for brain surgery. This piqued her interest in nursing; however, being an oncology nurse wasn’t as rewarding as she hoped. Glorioso decided to move to a different field of nursing and applied to Georgetown to continue her education. Unfortunately, she was waitlisted.

“That rejection moved me forward to where I am now,” Glorioso said. “So I called up that lady (the patient) and I said, “You know what? I tried to put on my big girl panties and here is the situation.’” 

Soon after, she began working in banking and climbing the ladder.

After landing a $23 million deal at her new banking job, she caught the attention of an insurance executive, who brought her on to look at self-funded claims. In time, her boss suggested that she become a benefits consultant. 

“I have always been blessed by mentors. I find myself thinking, ‘What can I do with all this information I now have?’ I want to be somebody who stepped in and changed my life. I want to be that for somebody,” Glorioso said.

On the 23rd anniversary of her brain surgery, her little boy had a seizure — the first of many.

“I thought, ‘What am I going to do to make a difference?’” Glorioso tells the crowd. She didn’t want her child to be labeled as the kid with an illness. So she decided to start telling their story and try to do something about it.

Finding a purpose 

“Health care benefits in the U.S. are broken,” said Bukola Ishola-Broome, a client manager at Nava Benefits. She began her career working in HR and became a benefits profesional to help people find exactly the right  benefits for their situation.

Her journey began when she was born by emergency C-section . Her parents, who immigrated to America from Nigeria, were saddled with an enormous medical bill because her dad’s health insurance was “what you would call now a bronze plan because it was the only plan he was allowed to have,” she said.

As a result, it took her father 10 years to pay off the bill and, she said, “that medical bill still haunts him today.” The impact that ordeal had on Ishola-Broome  led her to the employee benefits business.

And while all of that happened 35 years ago, “health care has not changed,” she said, “The brokerage firm has not changed at all. How are we going to meet people where they are? We need to realize that in order to create change, we need to ask people where they’re at. We need to ask employees what they need rather than us assuming. Perhaps we can create the narrative and drive that shift.”

“Brokers need to educate, educate, educate,” said Ishola. They need be a resource to employees and look at the cost share. “That is my goal and part of the reason I found my purpose.”

A shift to the human side of benefits

“Cancer was probably the best thing that ever happened to me,” said Dylan Slattery, co-founder & CEO at Excel Health Plans. “It taught me that I can say no, since I am a recovering people pleaser.”

At 22, he was diagnosed with melanoma, which was followed by surgery at the Mayo Clinic. The surgery saved his life, only to be followed 18 months later by the discovery of a “golf ball-sized lump” on his neck, which also turned out to be cancer. Slattery was told he had a less than a 10% chance of survival, while also feeling that “I was not being treated as a human.” As a result, he sought a second opinion at the University of Iowa.

“When we as brokers think about the high cost of care, we see the numbers that are correlated with care,” he said. “But when you’re on the other side of receiving care, it’s very different.” During that time, he was also involved in a car accident that killed a high school classmate. “So much more resonated with me,” said Slattery. “When you’re going through cancer, mental health is more important than treating the cancer, the trauma.”

So he began to share his story, was asked to speak at schools and became a sought-after motivational speaker sharing his story about having two bouts with stage 4 melanoma in his 20s. “When you start to be vulnerable and share your story, people can relate to the vulnerability,” he said.

So now, as a benefits professional, “I put myself into not the savings column of that spreadsheet but the member column. I keep running into brokers who want to do the right thing but don’t know where to start.” He refers to things like misaligned incentives and overpayments that he called “cancers of our industry.”

Slattery, who founded Excel with a patient-focused approach to health care, says it’s “going to take all of us to make small changes that will make a difference” in the industry.

The cancer “completely changed my trajectory,” he said. “We need to shift our mindset to the human side of benefits.