When considering his lofty goal, Hamilton also includes lives he’s impacted through his efforts to share the knowledge he has built over his career through his Benefits Insider brand, his social media channels and his participation with TRUE Network of Advisors. Ultimately, he knows it will be nearly impossible to accurately track how many lives are impacted through his work, but that doesn’t stop him from striving for that goal.

“Even if we were winning 30-0, my college football coach would always say at halftime, 'Don’t look at the scoreboard. Just keep doing your job,’” recalls Hamilton. “I have that as a guidepost. But even if I did hit 1 million lives impacted, would I stop? No.”

Chasing goals

Throughout his life, Hamilton has set a number of goals for himself and worked hard to achieve them. At nine years old, he started mowing lawns, scrubbing garbage cans and doing odd jobs to make money, because he wanted to save enough money to buy a car when he turned 16. As he got older, he played football in high school, participated in FFA and 4-H, raised cattle and hogs, hauled hay, learned to weld and dug ditches.

Hamilton attended Hardin-Simmons University in West Texas, a small private school where he played football and was a four-year varsity letterman. During his time there, he focused on finance and economics, while also studying agriculture in hopes of becoming a rancher.

Hamilton started his career as a commercial banking officer and spent 12 years ascending in the banking industry before making a change to the insurance industry. Since then, he has worked hard to fix what he sees as a broken health care system plagued by conflicts of interest and misaligned incentives.

A broken system

Among the many problems Hamilton sees with the current U.S. health care landscape are reduced competition due to the consolidation of hospitals in a post-ACA world, as well as vertical integration of services through the acquisition of physician groups that guarantee a flow of patients. The result of this dynamic is that members are being captured and retained inside the walls of hospital-owned entities, he says. In addition, Hamilton has also increasingly focused on inflated hospital billing structures.

“Medicare is causing a lot of issues that we see in the commercial paying market today because it doesn’t pay for care appropriately to hospitals, and hospitals cannot negotiate with Medicare. It’s dictated to them,” says Hamilton. “The hospitals are reliant on commercial payers, employers and their employees to make their profit.”

While Medicare rates may go up 3% per year, hospital inflation often comes in at between 7% and 10% per year, Hamilton says. With their costs rising faster than their reimbursements, providers are charging insurers more, a ghost which gets passed on to employers and ultimately employees. Hamilton describes this dynamic as a hidden tax on the employer market.

Employers are always striving to lower or maintain their costs, but this is in direct conflict with the incentive structure of insurers, Hamiltons says. As a result, his self-funding strategies have evolved to include negotiating with hospitals to find a fair price between reference-based and PPO pricing. The strategy to bring providers to the table and encourage them to accept a lower price is the guarantee that all employees from a company will go to that hospital for care, which the employer incentivizes by making care at that provider free for employees.

“The hospital gives the employer better pricing,” explains Hamilton. “The employer gives the hospital patients a guaranteed payment. Everyone gets what they want when we are able to have a conversation.”

Changing motivations

When he first got into this business, Hamilton says his goal wasn’t necessarily focused on helping employees.

“Indirectly, I was helping employees because I was helping to control the employer spend, improve their profitability and keep costs stable. But what I realized very quickly was the impact that the things we do have on the average employee.”

This personal impact became even more apparent to Hamilton when he watched his brother, who had a good job with solid corporate benefits, face bankruptcy when a health condition landed him in the hospital more than two dozen times over four years. Had his brother worked for one of Hamilton’s clients that have implemented direct contracts with providers and hospitals, the same level of health care would have cost him nothing, Hamilton says.

“It became a personal mission to me,” he adds. “I realized my job isn’t helping employers; my job is really to help people who don't have a voice. They work for an employer; they pay for their health insurance; and they hope that it protects them when they need it.

“We can literally change somebody's life by putting in the right benefit plan, managing it effectively and providing the right access,” he says.

When Hamilton was first conceptualizing these ideas, he approached Hotchkiss Insurance, which was primarily a property-casualty insurance firm, and pitched the idea to its CEO.

“I whiteboarded it for him one night,” says Hamilton. “I’m a visual person, so I told him that you really have to see this.”

The pitch was successful, and Hamilton joined Hotchkiss in 2018, where he was given the resources to build out his ideas. Since joining the firm, his department has grown its revenue by 10 times, with the ultimate goal to reach 38 times its revenue over the next 10 years.

Hamilton notes that it's not uncommon for him to find ways to save a client half a million dollars.

“If you cut their cost by half a million or even a million dollars, they now have a significant amount of money that they can invest back into their company,” he says. “That could come in the form of an expansion, or it could mean bonuses or pay raises for employees.”

The direct impact on employees is just as significant. The money they save in health care costs can translate into a new car, the ability to buy new furniture or to put more food on the table.

“You can have a pretty big impact just with some nominal changes,” he says.

A teacher who happens to work in benefits

One common theme he has encountered during his conversations with prospects and clients is that most employers don’t know how the health care system often works against them.

“That lack of awareness tells me that many of our peers in the brokerage community aren’t having these same conversations,” Hamilton says.

That realization has inspired him to share his knowledge not only with clients but also with colleagues and competitors. He believes that challenging the status quo and changing the U.S. health care system will require a group effort.

As one client put it, Hamilton is a teacher who happens to work in employee benefits.

And Spencer Smith, SVP, at ParetoHealth, echoes the importance of Hamliton’s impact on the industry. "Beyond Chris' innovative approach to health plan management, he does an excellent job of raising awareness for the industry at large. He creates social media content every single day that educates the entire marketplace,” he says. “I am a big believer in a rising tide lifts all boats, and Chris' mission is to do so for everyone, including his ‘competitors.’ I put competitors in quotations because he is very friendly with his peers and regularly meets with them to discuss ideas. He has the confidence that he is one of the best in the industry and doesn't perceive sharing ideas with industry peers as a threat. True to his nature, he wants everyone to be better for the greater good. I have been working with consultants for 13 years, and his mission-driven approach to benefits consulting is truly rare."

As he works to help educate the industry and spread the word about the innovative ideas and strategies he uses every day, Hamilton has built a significant online presence. But he didn’t start out with that goal in mind. When he graduated from college, he had no interest in having an online presence. In fact, as a college football player, he asked his school to remove his picture from the university website.

“I never wanted somebody to be able to Google my name and find a picture of me. That's how averse to the internet I was,” he says.

But as he dove deeper into educating employers about the health care market, he decided to harness social media not only to build familiarity around his ideas, but also to invite challenges to them.

“One thing about social media is that people love to argue,” Hamilton says. “It gives people an opportunity to tell me where I'm wrong, and it allows me to hone my craft; because I am wrong sometimes, and when I am wrong, I want somebody to tell me.”

Hamilton says he learns something new every single day and has come to realize that he doesn’t have the perfect answer for every scenario.

“Carriers change their programming. Hospitals change their strategies,” he says. “Updates and changes are happening constantly; I've got to be flexible and always open to learning something new.”