Benefits with Friends – Season 2 Episode 4 With Our Guest Patrick Moore

This episode of Benefits with Friends will feature Patrick Moore, President of Axim Fringe Solutions. Patrick is an Emerging Star in the benefits arena nationally who recently retired from the United States Marine Corps. How ironic that he will be appearing on our show on the 247th Birthday of the US Marine Corps…Oorah! AXIM Fringe Solutions Group, LLC (AXIM FSG) is the nation’s first and only health and welfare administration and compliance firm that is also a government contractor. In addition to being a Jarhead, Patrick is also self-proclaimed Geriatric Millennial. We’ll find out what that means to him. Lou is very much interested in getting Patrick’s perspective on the current state of employer sponsored health plans and the fee-for-service healthcare system. An industry in complete disarray must be quite alarming for someone so used to regime and discipline. What tools does Patrick’s past lend to help him help others threw the great unknown?

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Benefits with Friends – Season 2 Episode 4 With Our Guest Patrick Moore

I’m going to bring up Pat Moore right in. How are you? I dig it. Good stuff. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to chat. Pat and I have known each other for a couple of years now. We’ve met at a few different industry conferences. It’s always great to get together with him and a lot of other associates and friendly competition to share thoughts and ideas you know. When I spoke to Pat, scheduled him and agreed on this date, we had no idea how perfect this date was because Pat is a US Marine and benefits consultant. November 10th every single year is the birthday of our beloved core. It’s an important birthday. It’s the birth of the United States Marine Corps happened in Tun Tavern in Philadelphia in 1775. Everyone has two birthdays. One makes them super old and one makes them aging. You are not super. What a brotherhood I’ve seen on LinkedIn and some of your history. I was on there, peeking in there and I know how passionate you are about that. We could probably spend the whole show talking about that. It’s a benefit show. Hopefully, there are some benefit professionals out there joining, maybe some advisors. This is a great topic for them as well because I know you do work with benefit advisors in your capacity as a consultant. The topic of this show is related to health and welfare administration and compliance for government contractors, which is what you and your firm AXIM specialty. It’s highly specialized. If you want to take a minute to introduce yourself, the agency and we’ll get started. I have a lot of questions. I appreciate that. I have done my whole career in the Marine Corps. It tends to be a lot more interesting than the benefits, but I like the benefits part, quite frankly. We’re talking about the best part. I started my career in benefits more in the individual space and quickly amped up after a deployment to Iraq and an MBA program and started working at Hewitt Associates in Lincolnshire, Illinois. My first foray into employee benefits was the very large market. Fortune 500 employers. That is how Hewitt got its start and administration specifically, added consultancy and actuarial services along the way. That’s how they grew their business for the Fortune 500. The first groups I ever got to be attached to and didn’t know a d*** thing about d*** thing was 5,000 plus employers. They’re certainly different than the mom-and-pops and the middle market accounts, especially if you’re working with them in compliance and were it government contracting as well. They are very highly specialized, I can imagine. Not at the time with Hewitt, I found out over that Aon has probably the largest swath of government contracting, benefit business across the country. We have a huge swath of it, but at the time, that wasn’t my focus at all when I started the business. It was more commercial, very much the stuff that you touched with Lewis. That is where I started. I left there and went more to the middle market because, quite frankly, Corporate America generally doesn’t work well for the United States Marine. I love my time at Hewitt. I learned a ton. It was a great experience, but I also learned that the big market is as ugly as the small market as far as what’s happening to employers across the country. I took that experience and went to the middle market. Put Harvard on the chest and started a small firm in Chicago. Since then, I’ve been in that middle market space and cut my teeth there, is what I would tell you. I’ve worked with individuals up to 30,000 life groups and everything in between. The big market is just as ugly as the small market as far as what’s happening to employers across the country. Click To Tweet Since we spoke, I have been looking into contracts and did a lot of searching on the internet because I’m hoping that there are some companies out there that are doing government contracting that are going to maybe read this and become familiar with you and your firm, but also there might be some HR leaders out there that are interested or want to explore government contracting. I know it’s highly regulated. You can’t wake up tomorrow and decide, “I’m going to be a government contractor.” I don’t know if you want to share a little bit of your thoughts about it. How does a company become or work with a government contractor? It’s very specific. When it comes to benefits, it’s a very important part of the whole conversation, especially in the government contracting world, because there are multiple buckets that things fit in, but I’ll take two buckets for the time being. We can talk about SEA or DBA contracts. In those contracts, essentially, what you’re doing as an employer is managing a mini like a union planning. You have a dollar per hour you’re given per wage. You’re also given a dollar per hour for benefits. That dollar per hour, Jim Campbell would like to call it The Quant, but for non-math people, it is the floor and the ceiling. It is right down the middle. You can’t go higher or lower. If you’re lower or higher, it means something. It’s a very specified dollar amount you’re managing and you’re affecting the entire business. You’re automatically included in the C-Suite when you’re making these decisions, which is the whole point of boo. We’ve always wanted to be inside the C-Suite because we know how important benefits to the overall SG&A of a company. In a government contracting world, it’s understood to be there. It gives us a leg up in that competition. What AXIM has done is built a moat around the entire industry. We focus our core businesses in the compliance space. We work with carriers, consultants and directly with employees all across the country. All 50 states and international represent about 80,000 lives on our platform, the core businesses compliance. What we have done is continue to expand the reach and what we do. When we’re working with these employers, the first thing we do is let them sleep at night. Government contracting place compliance is a big deal. DOL audit happens a lot more frequently than they do in the commercial space. The government increased the amount of DOL auditors that are going out and finding companies and trying to make money. It’s a money-generating opportunity for them. AXIM has had over 320 audits and we have completely come out unscathed on every single audit. We give our employers an audit guarantee. If we ever did run into a problem, it was on us. We pay the penalties and the fines. If you are doing work with government contractors. If you are an employer that’s in that space, and I know you guys are unique because you’re both a consultant for businesses that do government contract work, but you’re also government contractors yourselves, which is pretty unique. That’s probably a big deal because you have to walk the walk and talk the talk. The business was formed as a government contractor so that we could sit on the same side of the table that our clients face. We understand how they build up their fringe rates and how they look at themselves when they’re bidding for work. We sit on the same side of the table. We’re the only one in the country that’s done that, making us unique. If you’re in this space, you’re an employer and you’re working in this world, give an example of compliance. You need to have your paperwork together. You need to know where you stand at any given time. When you say, “Here’s what you have to spend,” from what I understand, they’re paying you part of your compensation. Working with that government entity is that they’re giving you as part of your comp a certain dollar amount that must be spent on benefits. You’re saying that if you’re below that, you’re violating because they’re allocating that amount of money to your spending. It’s true. It’s the idea that it matters. If you’re above or below, it matters, not necessarily legally, but from cashflow or business profitability standpoint. If you’re more, you bid out at a certain rate. You’re not getting paid more by the Federal government to do this work. You’re immediately losing money as a business. That’s a big deal. What happens a lot of the time, especially with smaller employers, is they pay out their benefits in cash in lieu. Meaning they don’t have a benefits package and they pay it in cash. When you do that FICO, FUTA, all the different four-letter words that we all hate, add to the cost of these benefits and all of a sudden you’re spending 20% more than you thought you were when you’re throwing it out and that’s a problem as well.

It makes me think back over the last many years or of the times that have been asked for reports, data and things like that. This is why I was probably being asked out of the blue by one of our clients. When you’re in this business, people start asking you for reports and things. You think, “There’s competition,” but I’m thinking in my head I was like, especially some of the contractors that we work with, if they’re working on federal buildings, they’re a federal contractor. They won a bid and part of that bid is taken into account all those things you mentioned. They’re being asked to provide proof of, “What did you spend on this? What benefits do you have?” Sometimes we have clients that have come to us and said, “We need to add a line of benefits.” Is that also part of it sometimes? Are there also certain types of benefits you must offer under this type of contract beyond medical? All of the above. A lot of times, some of the ancillary stuff that’s offered in the industry your critical illnesses, your different life insurances and things like that get sold. Most of them are sold incorrectly. We offer specific products and suites to those employers that meet the criteria because most of these benefits need to be run through a trust system. It is also something that AXIM specializes in. Running these benefits appropriately is something that gets missed a lot. We find many advisors that have self-funded their employers. They don’t speak GovCon or this language. A lot of people think they’re doing the right things, doing a lot of the innovative stuff that you talk about every single day.

The problem is that you can’t offer those benefits if you don’t have the trust set up. It has to be a third-party disinterested trust set up and they haven’t done it. Going back to doing that is a problem. It’s what we specialize in. We help you know and find all these quirks of doing business in this space. We set up advisors for success. If you’re an employer reading this, if you’ve ever heard of Health Rosetta and if you’ve been following Lewis and what he’s talking about, we are the health Rosetta of this compliance industry. We are a transparent auditing firm. The rest of the industry is very opaque. They hide their fees. They charge exorbitant amounts of money, but no one ever knows it because they can’t see it. The pooled risk inside of a big VEBA trust was the exact opposite of that. We set up an individual trust for our clients. We run everything through our proprietary software and we are transparent as can be. At the push of a button, you can audit down to an employee level exactly what you have been paying and benefits on a weekly basis, going back multiple years. We built it that way to certify the compliance standards that the DOL has that when they go in for an audit, they try to give us a week to respond. We’re ready within the hour. This is what’s completely throwing off the industry because the rest of the industry hasn’t invested in technology the way that we have. They’re getting out of the business. They can’t compete because they’re trying to do it with Excel spreadsheets and manual processes in the background. It’s a problem. When that letter goes out to that entity, that CEO, COO, CFO or whoever it is, they want it now. The quicker you can respond to it, I would imagine, is an indication that you’re doing things right. They’re probably used to waiting for 1, 2 or 3 weeks or 1 month. I couldn’t even imagine, especially if someone who’s going through it for the first time and is not aligned with the right company that can help them with that compliance and reporting. There must be a lot of sleepless nights. Is there an average-size contract? Give me an example of a contract. There’s not an average-size con contract. These contracts are all over the place. Tens of thousand lives down to twenty-man group contracts. They’re all over the board. What also happens is once you win a contract as a government contractor, this is important for individuals brokers and consultants to think about, that twenty-man group that you know you got and it’s a ton of work for you and probably not very profitable if they’re in the government contracting space and they know what they’re doing, they can gain a contract overnight and jump from 20 to 400. The other direction is true as well. They can lose that money that quickly. Understanding that side of the business also is what we excel in because we own the data in the entire system. Major insurance carriers, consulting houses and most of the bigs work with us so that they have access to that type of data and analyze that type of risk. Since I have been at AXIM, I’ve begged the company to start getting into the smaller and independent brokers because those are the folks I love and want to work with. Part of being on here, I want everyone in the world to know that this is a huge opportunity for the independent broker and the good guys, the guys trying to do the right thing. They are trying to speak from on high about the problems in American healthcare because this is something that they’ll listen to compliance. They need it, and then you can do the right thing on the back end. They care more about the houses on fire than they do about how we can put in brand-new shutters. It’s a huge opportunity for independent folks. Let’s switch gears for a second because I thought about this since you agreed to come on the show. Being a US Marine, all of the training, discipline and regiment that you’re used to in your life and maybe not in every aspect of your life and then you get into the healthcare world, the benefits space and it is dysfunctional. I don’t know how far back it goes when you entered this. Do you remember what your first thought was? Was it good?” This is great. It’s complex. I can make a lot of money doing it. This is messed up. I don’t want to be part of this.” Do you recall what your thoughts were initially? It’s probably both. My beginnings are weird, starting in a very large market consulting house like Hewit associates. It is Aon large market. Aon bought them shortly after I started there. I went through that merger, which was an education in itself. When I started, I saw the advisors that I worked with as what they said was God’s truth. I thought that they knew everything because this was such a complicated space. It wasn’t just an account manager. The account manager had an actuary assigned a senior actuary. Most of these people are Northwestern math grads and brains on top of brains. When they said stuff, I assumed that’s the way it was as a guy looking at this stuff, I had access to the discount databases that they have and they preach about the best discounts out there. Let’s do the analysis of which one’s the best. This is the one. These guys have 55% discounts and these people have 52%. We’re going to go with the 52%. I’m like, “It’s that laser specific? This is incredible.” As a United States Marine, that tinkers a little bit. You start looking into the individual lines of data and you see the prices don’t make any sense. You get to a point where you hear the same record being played over and over knowing that you’re not making any difference in what you’re telling people. You may sound smart, but you’re not getting anything done. That’s where I deviated and that drove me nuts, quite frankly, seeing how this works and not being able to protect people. That is what the military, especially the Marine Corps prides itself on, is putting themselves in front of the bullets and the problems to save people and wanting to make a difference. I almost got out of the industry because of that. Quite frankly, there’s a lot of stuff you can do in the civilian world from a Marine Corps perspective. A lot of different business stuff you could do. Healthcare is a terrible conversation when the only thing you talk about is rising deductibles and how much the premium will go up every year. It’s a terrible conversation. The Marine Corps prides itself on putting themselves in front of bullets to save people and make a difference. Click To Tweet It got this close to completely leaving it. It’s all David Contorno and Marshall Allen’s fault because in 2017 they wrote an article inside BenefitsPRO. BenefitsPRO is super helpful for me and invited me down to speak at their event. It blasted my current employer at the time, which was amazing. It was highlighting David Contorno. It was blasting my boss, which was a very unique situation. It took me down a rabbit hole, like, “Who is this David Contorno guy? What is this Health Rosetta stuff?” Pat Moore sunk into complete networking. I have talked to many people across the good side of the industry since then. It’s been an absolute blessing. 2017 also was my 25th year in benefits. Since I got into the industry in ‘92, it’s been exclusively employee benefits. I was a general agent. I was the broker’s broker helping thousands of other brokers. I was the expert that everybody came to. I made the same assumptions that you did that the insurance carriers. They’re getting the best prices, those discounts. Who could blame me for thinking that these massive organizations with much leverage on behalf of their members, all of the individuals and the businesses that they represented who could argue that they would get the biggest discounts? It was incredible. I saw the numbers by accident. It’s funny because it wasn’t long before the health was getting started. It was right around the same time that a lot of people, for whatever reason, were starting to see, see things for the first time. It was probably because of the Affordable Care Act, because of the mandate of the release of data claims, data charges, discounts, all of that stuff started to sprinkle its way into the benefits industry through different organizations. When I saw it, my first reaction was I got pissed that I was a pawn in the wrong game. I was playing chess and the game was checkers that we were on. The rules get changed. Employers are at the mercy of a system that is completely misaligned. At that moment, I had to decide, “Was I going to go back to doing what I had been doing and making the money that I was making?” at the time, which was good, “or was I going to have to take a different path because I couldn’t sleep at night?” I had been through thousands of open enrollment meetings. I always talk about this because the open enrollment meetings are my favorite time of the year. I get to meet the members that I perceive that I help all year round. I work for money, obviously, but what motivates me is helping these employers and their members and taking pride in helping them control costs. I realized that it was completely a game. At the end of all of those open enrollment meetings, every single time, I always offered to stay behind to talk to people if they had anything personal that they didn’t feel comfortable discussing in front of their coworkers. I remembered, at that moment when I saw the data for the first time, all of the times that people had literally cried to me because we had increased a deductible, not by a lot, or prescription copay by $10, not perceived to be a lot of money. When you’re on a fixed budget and you have $5 or $10 prescriptions and you’re already only taking half of them, and now someone comes in and says, “That’s going to be another $20 a month,” they’re saying, “I’m going to have to give up another medication for that,” then you fast forward it to this moment when I saw how much artificial prices and hidden profits were in pharmacy. What I first saw was on the pharmacy side. I saw $2 medications that were on reports for $90. We’re talking 4,500% markup on generic medications. These are the medications that are most commonly filled and then you think about them like specialty medications. The next report I saw was specialty medications that were $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 or $20,000 a month to find out they’re not. That’s a fake price too. There are these huge significant rebates that are making their way back through the pharmaceutical company, back to the PBMs and the insurance companies for preferred placement prescription drug formulary so that more can be filled to drive up premiums. For a long time, it went unnoticed and then something interesting happened. I was selling insurance before there were networks. There was no managed care. There wasn’t a network. You went to any doctor. You paid the doctor and you got reimbursed. You had a relationship with your doctor. Managed Care came in with $2 or $5 copays and 100% coverage for the prescription. There wasn’t even a drug card. It was part of the medical plan. You fast forward that to now, where people are literally walking around with family deductibles of $15,000 to $17,000 and they have no coverage at all until they’ve reached that out-of-pocket. They’re paying $24,000 a year for the privilege of having that plan. You can’t think of, “If they’re not filling their prescriptions, how many people aren’t getting their medical care? Aren’t even getting physicals or routine care?” which, as we know, are most likely covered at 100% and people don’t know that. A lot of people don’t realize under the Affordable Care Act that true well-care, routine adult care, well childcare, if it’s truly routine, there’s no diagnosis. It’s covered 100% regardless of your out-of-pocket cost on your plan. People don’t know that. Half the people out there wouldn’t even know that. They avoid care completely and become sicker. Health Rosetta, for me, you and even someone who had a lot of years, it has been an incredible source of shared information and allowed me to partner with vendors that I would’ve never found and that would’ve never found me someone who was looking to try to do it a different way. You’re up for an award for the YOU Powered symposium.

They are being way too nice to me. I don’t know why they’re awarding me with stuff, but it’s very humbling. This is awesome that he puts this together. It’s a lot of work and I respect it. All the things you’ve set, like completely with you. The heart has to be there to want to be in this business the right way. The other side of the coin is people do this business to make money. The opportunity for folks to grow their businesses while doing the right thing has never been bigger. With what’s happened with the Consolidated Appropriations Act over the past couple of years and how that’s come into play, half the reason the AXIM conversion happened to me is that AXIM has been acting as a fiduciary for many years already. The word fiduciary is a brand new word in the healthcare space. What you’re talking about with drugs is happening on medical claims too. Don’t kid yourselves to think that carriers aren’t making money on the claims that are coming through those bills. We’re finding it now because we put all in front of all of our trust products with our self-insured, true care product line. We have AI auditing that is looking at all these claims coming through. We are catching the most massive frauds that you could ever think of.

You’re looking at hospitals billing $22,000 for surgery, but the insurance companies raking in hundreds of thousands and staff loss paying it. It is wild. The numbers will blow your mind. To get into this world and do the right thing, there’s never been more of an opportunity because all of the folks that are in the traditional industry, most of them have been bought up by private equity over the past years. Those folks paid large multiples to purchase them. All of those folks are making prime money. They’re not going to start making more money going forward with all the compensation disclosures that are required inside of CAA. It’s going to be shown how much money people are making and indirect and direct compensation. It will be a huge opportunity for the folks who want to do business the right way and be transparent. It’s a fantastic time to be in this business. It’s a great time. I talked to young advisors all the time. I was like, “You’re really fortunate.” In a lot of ways, it’s similar to what happened with me because when I did enter the industry back in late ‘91, not only did Managed Care enter the market. In New York, where I am, Community Rating entered the market, which meant that there was no more medical underwriting. We used to be able to ask individual health questions on the applications and we could deny a group. Everybody got a different rate based on their age, sex, family size, ZIP codes and all of those things, and health history. You guys can’t even self-insure under $100. $100 full-time equivalent or fewer, you’re in the small group market. It’s community rated. The only way to circumvent that is to go into a PEO, essentially. For $100, you can self-insure, stop loss and do all that. It’s a great business. Along the way since 2017, our purposeful prospecting is in all the conversations we’re having with trying to get companies to understand the real significant impact of working with independent third-party administrators, independent PBMs, direct contracting and working with a specialty pharmacy and infusion companies on a direct basis. We still have a pretty big book of small employers. A small employer could be 80 people. That’s not that small of an employer. They’re spending a lot of money on benefits. We’ve found plan add-ons or supplemental programs that can help them still circumvent a lot of the unnecessary out-of-pocket costs and premiums by providing navigation. At the core of it, what we’re trying to do is help people get to the best provider. My passion is to make sure that people get the best care. I don’t focus on saving money. It happens that when you take that approach, the best care costs less. The best care means getting people to the best primary care doctors and the best facilities. Those are the doctors that don’t overtreat. They don’t overperform. They’re not prescribing opioids at this offensive level that a lot of doctors do. Most of the best quality doctors are one thing. It’s important. Independent doctors also have an advantage in a quality sense because the large health systems do not handcuff them to steer people toward the highest price. There are a lot of things that can be done and we’ve rebranded our agency Bright Path because it’s not a one-stop shop. It’s not a one-plan fix all out there. Every one of our clients is very different and unique. Independent doctors have an advantage in quality because they are not handcuffed by large health systems that steer people towards the highest price. Click To Tweet We’re trying to find solutions for them based on their budget, needs, and people’s needs. Most importantly. It’s been rewarding the last couple of years, especially in this fight for the talent market. More people and businesses are looking. We get calls all the time from people saying, “We need to enhance our benefits.” We interviewed twenty people and everyone turned us down. Those few people that did agree to let us know why during the not an exit interview, but, “We’re offering you this position,” and someone declined it, “Why?” “Your benefits aren’t rich enough. The cost or the out-of-pocket costs are too high. There’s not enough choice. Your network’s too skinny.” We help clients, and I’m sure you do, too, solve those problems. I do know that there there’s probably an issue on LinkedIn with this video. The live broadcast may have stopped, but this is being taped in StreamyYard and we’re going to share this in case that’s the case. Someone let me know on my phone that LinkedIn had a little glitch. We’re still live in StreamyYard. I’m hoping that the LinkedIn thing gets fixed, but we’ll see. If it doesn’t, we’ll do it again. The stuff you’re doing is important. As a guy who started in a big agency and ran through the independent world, it is hard to talk about the thing that we’re most passionate about because most people don’t care. Most people, at the end of the day, unless they are sick, they have huge hospital bills until it matters to them. It’s a job that they’re fulfilling. The thing about what we’re doing with AXIM and the niche that we are in, we matter. We automatically do the right thing on the back end, which is a huge component. You do the thing they care about and then, on the back end, you exceed their expectations from a benefits perspective. It’s a complete win-win. I saw the testimonials on your website. I was reading them. I was like, “This is an interesting space.” When we talked earlier, I compared it with my limited knowledge of government contracting with the property casualty business because years ago, I ran the benefits department for a large independently owned P&C agency that was the largest in the country dealing with contractors. I didn’t talk to the clients. I worked with the producers and helped them put the benefits package together. I would sit through the renewal meetings and the break rooms where all of the producers were getting together to try to help solve each other’s problems. I could not believe how complex liability insurance could be depending upon, and I’m sure if you’re a government contractor, there are different lines of coverage that you must make sure you have. All of these different things, if you’re doing work near the ocean or you’re doing this, all of these different coverages. When you look through those contracts, half the time, they would win business because they were identifying gaps in coverage that put an employer in significant exposure.

If something went wrong on that job, they did not have the coverage for it. That is worth its weight and goal. People will pay more if they have to, knowing that they’re dealing with professionals who know that arena now. That’s why we have to talk about government contracting. Here in New York, I’m sure that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses. They might not know how important it is. They might be working with some large company potentially that’s not doing the right thing and don’t know where to look. They trust that like everybody does with healthcare and insurance. They’re huge. They must know what they’re doing. They must be doing the right thing for me. I applaud you guys for being able to not make it simple, but build, take the time to build the technology to put it at the finger as quickly as being able to push a button to get reports. You know what that cost is. You’re not keeping your customers in the dark and at your mercy. That’s great. That’s probably a testament to why you guys are growing at the rate you are. It’s highly specialized. I’m sure that these are big projects. Some of them might be real small. If you’re working on the sidewalk outside of a federal building for one day, are you a government contractor? You could be. What I’m going to do, though after this show is I’m going to connect you with our marketing manager because you’ve got the pitch better than I’ve got the pitch. We are going to hire you for some consultative marketing. That’s what I’ve decided. Being in this space, it’s super selfish to say this, but if I’m an independent guy, I am 100% pivoting and focusing on this niche completely because it’s a niche but it’s an $80 billion niche. It’s ginormous. The players that are dominating it currently. Not only our legacy from a benefits perspective. They’re legacy from a compliance and technology perspective. To give you an example, our competitors, when they offer health insurance premiums for SEA workers, they don’t even give you a price. They say, “For your fringe rate at a full-time workforce, you have access to this medical plan.” They don’t even give you a price. They take all of their fringe dollars. That’s their health insurance coverage. What is a huge deal for us is that we are part of a subset of this group. It’s something that we’ve been exploring and, quite frankly, is in the AbilityOne workforce in government contracting. That is different contracts that fulfill their workforce with physically or mentally handicapped folks. They get a fringe rate as well. They are getting compensated the same way. They’re putting these mentally handicapped people in a bucket and those folks steal all of their fringe money, put in a health insurance policy they can never use, the commissions get collected, the advisors and the organizations get paid. These policies are way underutilized because they can’t afford to use them. The deductibles are too high. You’re essentially stealing fringe and commission. It’s a disgusting way to do business. We’re going to get in touch offline and have a deeper conversation about this. As soon as we started talking about it, I was like, “My brain started clicking.” It’s a niche, but it’s such a necessary function that you are, that you’re providing. I know that Jim is an ex-marine as well. I’m wearing a flag in the background. Our office is closed. To me, it’s the most important federal holiday of the year and the people here feel the same way. This is terrific. It’s a great opportunity. I know that there are some advisors that read this show routinely. Your websiteis AximFsg.com. If there’s anybody out there that wants to get in touch, I’ll give the toll-free number that’s on your website out in case anybody asks for Pat Moore, (855) 808-4474. You’ll be happy that you contact these guys. Contact me if you’re in New York and you’re interested in learning more about this. I couldn’t be happier to know that we know each other. I’ll definitely see you in Miami in February 2023. I appreciate it. Thanks for putting it on. I’m a LinkedIn guy. If people are reading this and want to hit me, that’s probably the easiest way to do it. Fantastic Marine Corps birthday, healthcare and the Marine Corps all in one day. I appreciate it. Thank you much. I appreciate it. Have a great weekend. Happy birthday to you, Marine Corps. Have a great time. Hopefully, you’re seeing some of your buddies or family.

Important Links

• Pat Moore
• David Contorno – BenefitsPro
• Marshall Allen – BenefitsPro
• LinkedIn – Patrick Moore

About Patrick Moore

Outside of his 20 years of service in the US Marine Corps, Pat has spent his entire civilian career in the Insurance and Employee Benefits industry. From his start in the individual space, to working with Fortune 500 employers at Hewitt Associates (now Aon), Pat has helped employers large, small, and everywhere in between solve their employee benefits challenges. Throughout his career, Pat noticed a trend: the industry was built to enrich itself and confuse its clients. From that realization, it became Pat’s mission to simplify healthcare for employers and employees alike.