But the big thing is that the HRA providers and the insurers they work with are intensely interested in employers and employers' health plans. The HRA providers want to provide the employers with a saw that the employers can saw their health plan legs off and get out of the health benefits sponsorship trap.

Plenty of small firms want to help employers manage the cost of treating obesity by persuading the workers to try dieting before going on Wegovy or Mounjaro.

Many other players in the health benefits universe simply don't seem all that sincerely interested in employers.

Members of Congress seem to have a vague sense that employers are out there providing coverage.

The topic came up just once when the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee was conducting the nomination hearing for Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the new secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. One senator asked her about health benefits for independent contractors.

The topic came up about a few times, briefly, when the Senate HELP Committee was conducting a nomination hearing for Daniel Aronowitz, the nominee to be the HHS assistant secretary who will be the administrator of the Employee Benefits Security Administration — the agency in charge of employers' self-insured health plans.

So, what does Aronowitz think about provider network adequacy, surprise medical bills and coverage for the expensive new weight-loss medications? Members of the Senate HELP Committee never got around to asking Aronowitz about that. He did mention that he's interested in mental health care coverage and supports association health plans.

So, health insurers and the securities analysts who follow them must be full of questions and insights about the state of the employer health plan market. Right?

Nah.

When Cigna, CVS Health (the company that bought Aetna), Elevance (the company that was Anthem) and UnitedHealth hold quarterly earnings calls with the analysts, most of the talk about is about any health care delivery operations they now own, their pharmacies, their pharmacy benefit managers, their Medicaid plans, their Medicare plans, how great their employees are, how disciplined they are about expense management, how sad that latest natural disaster was, how thoughtful they are about the geopolitical environment are, how discplined they are about expense management, how one analyst got cut off and the analyst should call back, how discliplined they are about expense management, and about how, yes, they will spend about $1 billion on buying back shares of their own stock, thanks to the fact that they are disciplined about expense management.

Sometimes they talk for a few seconds about how the stop-loss claims covering the self-insured employers went through the roof, and then to Jupiter, but that's about it.

You might think that that the big benefits brokers would be different. But executives from Aon, Arthur J. Gallagher, Brown & Brown, Marsh McLennan and Willis Towers Watson spend most of their earnings calls talking about how sad they are about recent natural disasters, then about how this or that property and casualty markets has hardened or softened, and then, maybe, about how the health benefits business outside the United States is doing. They then might talk for a second or two about how much the U.S. employer health benefits market has or has not grown, year over year.

The National Association of Insurance and Benefits Professionals starts its annual convention in Miami Beach, Florida, Saturday. The only insurance companies listed as event sponsors on its website at press time were Av Med, Excel Health Plans, MassMutual and Fenyx Health.

The only health insurers listed as sponsors on Health Agents for America's site were Centene's Ambetter and Wellcare units, Tokio Marine HCC's MedPlus stop-loss unit and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana.

Meanwhile, if you look on the website for Medicaid Health Plans of America, the list of sponsors for its 2024 annual conference included AmeriHealth Caritas, Centene, Elevance, Highmark, Horizon, Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealth's UnitedHealthcare unit.

The general lack of employer health benefits buzz might be a blessing this summer. One reason the topic is getting so little attention is that, as of press time, Congress has not included a provision narrowing the scope of the group health tax exclusion in the Big Beautiful Bill Act tax package. The sky over the employer health plan sky could still fall, but Congress is not intentionally pushing it.

But, for a reporter, covering the health benefits sector now is somewhat like trying to review an art film with no dialog, where the characters give their different kinds of silence meaning by narrowing their eyes, flaring their nostrils and pursing their lips.

At some point, one could imagine that it could be helpful to commercial health benefits, in some way or another, if more people were talking about the subject out loud.