Speaker Recap: Allison De Paoli on Taking Control of Healthcare Costs

Most speakers on employee benefits put the room to sleep. Allison De Paoli did the opposite.

De Paoli, founder of Altiqe Consulting and one of the most decorated benefits advisors in the country, brought a session to our CEO peer group that was equal parts expose and action plan. The core argument: the health insurance industry is not broken. It is working exactly as designed, just not for you.

The system is built to keep businesses paying more while believing they have no options. Traditional brokers and big carriers profit when employers feel stuck. The annual rate hike is not an inevitability of the market. It is the result of employers accepting rules they were never required to accept in the first place.

De Paoli dismantled that narrative point by point. Her track record backs it up: clients who have held employer budgets flat for five or more consecutive years, pharmacy costs reduced by 25% without touching employee copays or deductibles, and stop loss coverage restructured from a sunk cost into a balance sheet asset. These are not theoretical outcomes. They are what happens when a CEO stops deferring to the carrier and starts asking the right questions.

For our members, the questions she left the room with were immediately actionable. Do you actually need the brand name logo on the card? Can the same test be done at a lower cost facility? Is your plan structured to serve your employees or your broker’s renewal commission?

Healthcare is one of the largest line items on most company P&Ls, and most CEOs treat it as a fixed cost. After an hour with Allison De Paoli, nobody in the room was willing to do that anymore.