Last week, Roundstone’s Medical Captive Forum let the good times roll in the Big Easy. With over 400 guests, we celebrated affordable healthcare New Orleans style with great food, jazzy music, and practical tips to lowering your benefits spend without compromising care quality.

With an educational focus, MCF helps employers understand how to provide better healthcare benefits at an affordable cost through self-funded insurance under a group captive. No matter your experience in the captive, you learn new approaches to self-funding and how to tweak your plan to better optimize savings, care, and custom plan design to meet your employees’ healthcare needs.

The theme of our 9th annual MCF was The Big Easy Approach to Benefits: Quality, Affordable Healthcare Made Simple. Providing your employees great benefits that are also affordable shouldn’t be hard. By self-funding under a group captive, employers can deliver their employees the care they need at a cost they can afford. With Roundstone, they have the tools to succeed and the help they need to implement those tools effectively.

In our culture, we baby children and romanticize childhood. We often forget that kids can also inspire and do amazing things.

Such is the case with the Little Saint Nick Foundation, whose motto is “Kids inspiring and helping kids.”

The Little Saint Nick Foundation is a non-profit that strives to put smiles on kids in crisis through the compassionate help of other children. It helps to inspire and comfort children who find themselves in a scary situation such as a children’s hospital, where fear and anxiety are the norm.

With the contributions of kids who are often of similar ages to the children they help, the foundation regularly provides simple, anti-anxiety gift bags that typically include a coloring book, crayons, a stuffed animal, a Pop It toy, and a hand-made get-well card made by a like-minded child. Thanks to these efforts, over 300 children receive gift bags and other gifts every single day. Their work provides inspiration for sick and struggling kids, a positive distraction for parents, and helps teach child volunteers valuable leadership skills that can change their lives and benefit communities.

The Little Saint Nick Foundation empowers children to help other children, one smile at a time. They help make the trauma of a medical experience less scary and remind struggling children of the joys of childhood, especially during extremely trying times.

Whether you’re an advisor or employer, there’s something special about having personal, one-on-one access to your insurance policy’s underwriter, keeping them on speed dial, so to speak.

At Roundstone, you always have a close connection to the in-house underwriters of your policy.

You gain personal access, which means you benefit from their wisdom and experience. You can better understand whether a policy is right for you – and you can better custom design that policy so it better meets the unique healthcare needs of your people.

In-house underwriting sets Roundstone apart when it comes to stop-loss captives. It offers both advisors and employers rare access that can be invaluable when it comes to crafting that perfect self-funded health plan to meet their needs.

Looking back, these last few years at Roundstone have been an exciting ride – we’ve managed a consistent nearly 30% growth rate, driven by the steadily increasing demand of the market. Why? What’s causing more employers to make the move to a self-funded stop-loss captive?

Simple. They’re caught between a rock and a hard place. Ask any employer come renewal season. The pain is real. The cost of health insurance keeps getting more expensive, and there are many reasons why.

Healthcare has become a top business expense, second only to payroll. In the last 10 years, the cost of health insurance has skyrocketed over 150% – and it’s projected to double in the next four years, according to a Mercer Survey. Employers as well as their employees are paying more. Everyone’s frustrated and unhappy when it comes to healthcare.

New Year’s is like the world’s birthday – it’s our opportunity to make a different and better world for ourselves, our teams, and our families.

What are going to be your contributions – start working out, consume less, spend more time creating and less time binging? Now’s the perfect time for change. What will yours be?

But before you nose-dive into grandiose ambitions for this next year, I created a fast and simple 10-step plan to make the whole process of renewal more manageable. It’s a great place to start if you want to see actual results, change worlds, and maybe even move a few mountains.

These are certainly surreal times. After more than a year of adapting to the COVID crisis, we as a nation are finally coming out the other side — for better or worse, ready to meet tomorrow.

One thing’s for sure: It’s not the same world — probably never will be again. And this affects how you should purchase fin tubes.

Masks are coming off, literally and figuratively. The economy’s heating up like a heat exchanger brimming to boil.

Nevertheless, industries continue to face unprecedented challenges. The country is in the midst of a labor crunch — qualified personnel are difficult to find. And in hand with labor shortages come supply chain deficits. It’s not easy to find what you need when you need it — and the cost can be anyone’s guess.

“As the pandemic has hampered factory operations and sown chaos in global shipping, many economies around the world have been bedeviled by shortages of a vast range of goods — from electronics to lumber to clothing,” write Peter S. Goodman and Niraj Chokshi in the New York Times. “In a time of extraordinary upheaval in the global economy, Just In Time is running late.”

In our mission to deliver quality finned tubes to our customers, Energy Transfer is by no means immune to the challenges of the marketplace. Fortunately, we’re well positioned and have an advantage over many of our competitors, but the market for fin tubes has become the proverbial Wild West.

More often than not, you’re shooting from the hip, trying to stay ahead of the stampede.

Waking up this morning over a steaming cup of coffee, a meme suggesting Trump crapped himself caught me off guard and immediately stole 20 minutes of my soul.

I laughed, as anyone who still can should. And then I Googled “Trump poops pants in public” because, well, that’s the world we live in these days.

You can find an image of the 45th president, post golf swing, with an obvious brown stain down the back of his trousers. Turns out that image was Photoshopped. But it’s totally believable, considering the legal turd hurricane our former president increasingly finds himself in. No matter your take on MAGA, who wouldn’t mess themselves wearing those golf pants?

Maybe not the best way to begin the day that honors the legacy of MLK, I’ll admit.

And then I thought: “What’s happened to our leaders?”

You know what feels pretty sweet? Partnering with great people.

After all, strong partnerships make the world go around — where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. Your success and theirs is integrated — synchronously beneficial and symbiotic. You work together like distinct parts in the same machine.

That’s why we couldn’t be happier with our partnered collaboration with Amazon. CTM is a major supplier of shipping and printing labelers for Amazon’s Fulfillment Centers. In fact, Amazon ships millions of products that have been labeled by a CTM label applicator. Amazon’s level of trust in our labeling machines is a source of community pride.

It never fails. After a heavy San Francisco rainstorm, your basement smells like old man socks. You’ve got a musty smell in your crawl space. What can you do about it?

Just because your basement or crawl space smells like Neil Young’s Birkenstocks after a night of heavy jamming, don’t take it personally. It happens to the best of us.

You likely have a mold and mildew issue from water seeping through the walls. It could also be a dead animal. Or perhaps live animals turned your basement or crawl space into an Outside Lands porta-potty.

Or it could be Crazy Horse moved into the cellar and haven’t done laundry in a long time.

Either way, you’ve got problems. Your crawl space smells bad – like old man feet when the socks come off.

But you don’t need to just accept it like a heavily scripted rock opera taking over the entire first set. Get rid of that musty smell in the crawl space with a concerted renovation program that’s bio-safe and eco-friendly.

Here’s how to get started to rid of that musty smell in the crawl space without the use of poisonous chemicals. With a little rehabilitation and eco-friendly cleaning, your space can practically smell like roses, or perhaps even like Daryl Hannah in the days of “Splash.”

Your ETS date is on the calendar. You’ve served your country, and your time is almost complete. What’s next?

As you move forward into civilian life, it’s best to make the transition out of the military as stress-free as possible.

Adjusting to civilian life can be challenging. According to data from the University of Southern California, two of three military veterans reported they struggled to adjust to life after the military. Three out of four did not have a job lined up after getting out, and roughly a third ran into financial trouble.

It’s easy to make mistakes, which can cost you years and lost wages. To set yourself up for success and ensure a smooth transition, avoid these three common errors. Your family will thank you.

Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. But then again, how did the wheel ever become a wheel in the first place?

Some caveman prototyped it — hashed out a design and tested it ‘til it rolled like a stone. And to do that, he had to experiment — play around — until he found something that worked. It’s the same way with custom enhanced finned tube fabrication.

In order to build a fin tube made to order, you need to work with a manufacturer who has the capacity — the experience, capabilities, and infrastructure — to be able to experiment.

You’ve got an idea — a modification, an improvement, an invention to make life easier — but you need to find somebody to build it.

Want in on a secret that only jewelers who aren’t paid on commission are willing to share?

Seen this ad?

“I’m Henry Hill, and I quit smoking with a pharmaceutical — side effects may include farting, seizures, and heart attacks….”

You don’t need to be a Hollywood movie star or a Wiseguy to wonder if there’s a better way to quit smoking than a freaking heart-fart attack.

Can you effectively quit smoking cigarettes with a tobacco alternative like an herbal smoking blend?