Engineering a Path to Zero-Percent Renewals

For years, Nitsch Engineering operated under a fully insured model. Like many mid-sized firms, they found themselves at the mercy of annual “market trends” and carrier spreadsheets.

• Unsustainable Hikes: Every year brought a new increase, forcing the firm to raise employee contributions or strip back plan quality
• Market Flight: By 2016, the situation became critical when a major carrier declined to even provide a quote, leaving the firm with almost no leverage.
• The Breaking Point: “I can’t even imagine where we’d be right now… what kind of poor coverage we would have, and what we’d be paying for it if we had stayed fully insured.” — Lisa A. Brothers, Past President & CEO

Nitsch Engineering partnered with Captivated Health to help found a specialized Engineering Risk Cell. By moving to a member-owned captive model, they shifted from being a “customer” of an insurance company to an “owner” of their own health plan.

• Risk Protection: Liability protections were built-in to cap the company’s exposure to individual high-cost claims.
• Transparency: They gained total visibility into where every dollar was going—allowing them to craft a plan specifically for their engineers.
• Continuity: They maintained their existing network of doctors and hospitals, ensuring zero disruption for their employees.

“We have been able to keep our employee premium contribution increases flat over the past five years. In fact, we’ve even started to reduce our employee premium contributions over the last two years.”

1. Defying the Market Trend

While the national average for health insurance premiums continued to climb, Nitsch Engineering achieved five consecutive years of 0% increases for their staff.

2. Reclaiming the Surplus

In their second year, the firm received a surplus check (money back). Unlike traditional insurance where the carrier keeps the profit in a “good year,” that money went back into the company’s bank account.

3. Reinvesting in Talent

Because of the savings generated by the Captivated Health platform, Nitsch didn’t just maintain their plan—they enhanced it. They were able to improve benefits and lower the cost for employees, creating a powerful recruitment and retention tool in a competitive engineering market.

Nitsch Engineering proved that a “bad year” (including a high-cost claim in Year 1) doesn’t have to lead to a double-digit rate hike. By sharing risk with a community of like-minded firms and taking control of their data, they turned their health plan from a financial burden into a strategic asset.