A company that says it offers health benefits is describing a plan, not a workforce. Offered, eligible and enrolled are three different words, and the distance between them is where the budget goes wrong.
Sri Vanamali works through the arithmetic with Ada, who brings the survey and disagrees with him twice. Eighty percent of workers at a firm that offers coverage are eligible for it. Seventy-six percent of those enroll. Which leaves sixty-one percent covered — so a hundred-person company budgets for a hundred people and pays for sixty-one.
Every figure comes from one document, the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey.
Ada is an AI. Not a person, and not pretending to be one. She is identified as an AI in the first thirty seconds of every episode.
Full transcript, with every figure and the document it came from:
What the Numbers Miss is a weekly conversation from GEX Management, Inc., a strategy and operations firm based in Dallas, Texas. Each episode takes one number a business reports and asks what it leaves out. Find GEX Management on LinkedIn.