The Employer Benefits Product Your Biggest Competitors Are Already Selling

While most brokers are still leading with fully-insured plans and watching their accounts walk out the door every renewal season, a growing number of top producers have discovered a product that wins new business, retains accounts, and generates bigger, better commissions — year after year.

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The Problem

Your Clients Are Getting Crushed at Renewal

Let’s be direct. Every year you sit across from an employer client and deliver the same bad news: premiums went up 8%, 12%, sometimes 20%. You do your job — you shop the market, you negotiate — and you still hand them a number that makes their stomach drop. And every year, they wonder if there’s something better out there. Some of them are already being called by someone who has an answer to that question. That answer is level-funded benefits. And Zuniga Health built the most competitive version of it in Illinois.

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The Opportunity

Why Level-Funded Is the Fastest-Growing Segment in Group Benefits

The fully-insured market is a black box. Employers pay a premium, the carrier keeps the profit, and no one tells them why costs went up. It’s a model designed to extract maximum margin from employers who don’t know there’s another way. Level-funded changes the game entirely. The employer pays a fixed monthly amount — predictable, budgetable, no surprises. Claims are funded transparently. Stop-loss coverage protects against catastrophic exposure. And here’s the part that turns brokers into heroes: This isn’t a niche product for edge cases. Advisory Board data shows level-funding has become the fastest-growing model for small and mid-size employers — and the brokers who positioned themselves early are now writing the largest cases in their regions.

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The Zuniga Difference

Why Zuniga Health Is the Broker’s Unfair Advantage

Not all level-funded products are created equal. Most TPAs are generic — national platforms with cookie-cutter networks and average claims performance. Zuniga Health was built differently, specifically for the Illinois market, with a direct-contract model that gives brokers and their clients a genuine competitive edge. Here’s what makes Zuniga Health the product serious brokers are putting in front of their best accounts:

• Direct contract with Advocate Health Care — co-developed products with the 5th largest nonprofit integrated health system in the U.S., right here in Chicago. This is not a rental network. It’s a true direct-contract model.
• 10 plan designs ready to sell — 3 PPO and 7 HDHP options give you flexibility to fit virtually any group’s needs and budget, without the endless customization delays.
• No balance billing, ever — one of the biggest fears employers and employees have about self-funded arrangements is surprise bills. That fear ends here. Full stop.
• No reference-based pricing friction — RBP creates employee friction and HR headaches. Zuniga uses a direct-contract model that eliminates the conflict entirely.
• Full-stack PMB included — pharmacy, medical, and benefits administration handled end-to-end. One vendor, one relationship, one point of accountability for you.
• Built for Hispanic-owned and underserved employer markets — a largely untapped segment with massive growth potential and employers desperately seeking a broker who actually understands their community.
• Illinois-based TPA — local expertise, local responsiveness, local relationships. Not a national call center that doesn’t know your market.

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Side-by-Side Comparison

What You’re Selling Now vs. What You Could Be Selling

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The Broker Upside

What This Means for Your Business

Grant Cardone says it plainly: 10x your thinking or someone else will occupy the space you left behind. The brokers building 7-figure books right now aren’t doing it by working harder on the same products. They’re selling solutions that employers can’t get anywhere else. Here’s your business case for adding Zuniga Health to your product portfolio:

• Differentiation that wins proposals. Walking into an employer meeting with a level-funded solution from a direct-contract, Advocate-partnered TPA is not the same as showing up with another carrier quote sheet. You become the expert. You become the recommendation.
• Dramatically improved retention. When an employer gets a refund check, they don’t leave. When they see their claims data, they trust you. Retention goes from transactional to relational.
• Access to an underserved market. Zuniga Health’s focus on Hispanic-owned businesses in Illinois opens a pipeline of employers who feel overlooked by the mainstream benefits market. Be the broker who shows up for them — and you won’t have competition.
• Master broker and GA opportunities. The network effect here is real. Position yourself upstream, build a distribution system beneath you, and capture overrides on every case your downline writes.
• You can finally promise something different. Instead of saying “I shopped the market and this was the best I could do,” you say: “I have a solution that didn’t exist for you before. Let me show you what your numbers look like.”

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Handling Objections

What Employers Will Ask — And How You’ll Answer

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The Right Frame

The Mindset Shift That Separates Good Brokers from Great Ones

Zig Ziglar taught us that people don’t buy products — they buy solutions to problems they feel urgently. Your employer clients feel the urgency of rising premiums every single year. They feel it in their budget meetings. They feel it when a key employee leaves because the benefits got worse again. Robert Cialdini would remind you that social proof is powerful here: employers are watching what other employers do. When a competitor down the street switches to a level-funded plan and gets a refund check in year one, that story travels fast. Brian Tracy’s law of reciprocity applies too: bring an employer an idea they’ve never seen before, one that actually puts money back in their pocket, and you’ve created a client for life — one who refers, who renews without shopping, and who says your name when a peer asks who their broker is. The question isn’t whether level-funded is a better product. It is. The question is whether you’re going to be the broker who brings it to your market first — or the broker who watches someone else do it.

Zuniga Health · Illinois Third-Party Administrator · zunigahealth.com Products designed for small- and medium-sized employers in the Chicagoland area.