by Jason Coon
What I’m Hearing from Catholic Organizations
Over the past month, I’ve had the privilege of spending time with Catholic entrepreneurs, students, business leaders, academics, and CBA members in some very different settings. The conversations have been different, but I’ve noticed a common thread: Catholic organizations are trying to live their mission in very practical ways—and sometimes discovering that the people and organizations they depend upon don’t always understand, much less support, that mission.
So, where in the world have I been?
SENT Conference
At the beginning of the month, I attended the SENT Conference and was thrilled to meet so many other “builders” who are actively engaged in building the next generation of Catholic businesses and solutions.
What struck me most was the uniquely Catholic environment of the conference. There was an energy around entrepreneurship, but it wasn’t entrepreneurship detached from faith. I saw people thinking about how their faith should shape what they build, how they lead, and ultimately what kind of businesses they want to create.
That was encouraging. It reminded me that the Catholic business community isn’t simply trying to preserve what already exists. There is a generation actively thinking about what comes next.
Protected for Purpose
That same question followed me to The Catholic University of America. Through the Busch School of Business HR Speaker Series, I had the opportunity to talk with students, business leaders, and academic professors about a subject that has become increasingly important to me: Protected for Purpose.
Led by Professor Tracy Phillips, our “fireside” conversation became an opportunity to talk about employee benefits as a ministry of a Christian employer. We often talk about religious liberty in terms of what Catholic organizations are protected from. But there is another question worth asking: What are we going to do with that freedom?
If a Catholic organization has the freedom to structure its employee benefits according to its Catholic mission, then benefits become more than a compliance exercise. They become an opportunity to express what the organization believes about the human person, family, health, and the purpose of medicine.
That conversation reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for some time: Health plans are not neutral.
But the conversations that have stayed with me most this month haven’t necessarily happened on a stage. They’ve happened in conversations with our members—and increasingly, we’re hearing their experiences directly through the feedback they’re providing to us.
We recently asked members to share their experiences through a CARLO Plan Review survey. The response has been encouraging, and we’re still collecting feedback. One of the biggest challenges members have identified so far is changing plan document language.
That may sound like a technical issue.
It isn’t.
For a Catholic organization, the language in a health plan is one of the places where mission becomes operational. It is where broad principles have to become actual definitions, exclusions, coverage provisions, and administrative instructions. And if that language doesn’t reflect the organization’s values and the protections it has sought, identifying the gap is only the beginning—the real work is translating mission into language that can be consistently understood, administered, and lived out in practice.
This is an area where I’ve seen firsthand that a CARLO review doesn’t have to be the end of the process. It can be the beginning.
When a member identifies an issue through a CARLO review, I work alongside the organization, its consultant or broker, and its TPA to help identify and adopt plan language that better aligns with the organization’s Catholic values and CBA protections. Once those changes are made, we can rescore the plan and measure the progress.
The process is straightforward:
Initial Moral Compliance Score → Personalized Road Map → Plan Revisions with CBA → Rescore
We’ve already seen members make meaningful progress through this process, with organizations reaching Moral Compliance Scores in the 95–100% range after working through identified issues.
That’s real progress. And it reinforces something I’ve come to believe through this work: identifying a problem is not the same thing as solving it.
Sometimes the hardest part isn’t knowing that something needs to change. It’s getting the various people involved—the organization, consultant, broker, TPA, and others—to understand what needs to change and actually make it happen.
And that brings me back to something else we’re hearing from members.
“We’re not being heard.”
We continue to hear from members who feel like they aren’t being heard by their business partners. They find themselves repeatedly explaining why a Catholic organization may approach a benefit differently. They have to explain why a particular provision matters. They have to ask questions they expected their business partners to understand.
And sometimes they feel as though they have to continually pull a Catholic perspective into a relationship that should already have room for it.
That gets exhausting.
I think there is an important distinction here. A business partner can be very good at what they do and still not be a good mission-aligned partner. Technical competence matters. Expertise matters. Experience matters. But for a Catholic organization, there is another question: Do you understand what we are trying to accomplish? And perhaps even more importantly, can you help us accomplish it?
Mission alignment doesn’t mean every business partner has to be Catholic. But it does mean that a Catholic organization’s identity cannot become an inconvenience that has to be explained away every time it enters the conversation.
As I was thinking about these conversations, I wanted to hear what others in the health benefits marketplace are seeing. I recently reconnected with Phil Berry, CEO of Northwind Health, at the SENT Conference. Phil has been a guest on our “What’s in your Health Plan” Podcast, and I asked him a simple question: What are you seeing in the market right now that Catholic employers should be paying attention to as we approach another open-enrollment season?
His response reinforced something I’ve been hearing from our members: stewardship requires engagement.
Phil pointed to several areas that employers should be thinking about. First, employers should expect continued pressure on health-plan costs. But they shouldn’t necessarily assume that a double-digit increase at renewal is simply something they have to accept. He is seeing employers find opportunities through strategies such as GLP-1 management, biosimilar adoption, generic utilization, specialty pharmacy, and chronic-condition management.
Second, he challenged employers to think about their health plan as more than a mechanism for paying claims. Our health benefits are a significant opportunity to invest in the health and flourishing of employees and their families. Open enrollment is an opportunity not only to explain what the plan covers, but also to help employees think differently about their health, engage with their benefits, and become better stewards of the healthcare resources available to them.
And third, Phil emphasized the importance of asking hard questions. As Catholics, we believe that health is a gift to be stewarded. Employees have a responsibility to steward their health, and employers have a responsibility to steward the resources entrusted to them. That means asking whether we are doing everything reasonably possible to make healthcare more affordable, accessible, and effective for our employees.
One observation from Phil particularly stayed with me: “Doing nothing is a decision, too.”
Every year, employers decide what their health plan will cover, how it will pay for care, and how actively it will manage unnecessary costs. In an environment of rapidly rising healthcare expenses, simply renewing last year’s plan is still a decision.
I’m grateful to Phil for sharing his perspective and for the work Northwind Health is doing in this space. It’s encouraging to encounter business leaders who understand that healthcare stewardship involves both the economics of the plan and the people the plan is ultimately intended to serve.
Phil’s observation about doing nothing being a decision made me think about something else I’ve been hearing from members.
Doing nothing is a decision when it comes to mission, too.
Every year, Catholic employers make decisions about their health plans.
- What will we cover?
- What won’t we cover?
- What resources will we make available?
- What will we ask of our vendors? How will we communicate benefits to our employees?
- What will we do when the marketplace assumes something different from what we believe?
Those decisions communicate something.
And that is why I continue to believe that health plans are not neutral.
But there is another lesson from this past month that may be just as important: mission has to survive the hand-off.
When we hand part of our benefits program to a broker, consultant, carrier, TPA, PBM, or other business partner, our mission doesn’t go with them automatically. It has to be understood. It has to be communicated. And ultimately, it has to be governed.
That’s why the relationships we build matter so much.
This is why “meeting members where they are” has become increasingly important to me. Our members aren’t all in the same place. Some are asking fundamental questions about how Catholic identity should influence their benefits. Some are dealing with very specific legal or compliance questions. Some have strong relationships with their business partners but need help translating Catholic principles into plan design and administration.
And some are simply tired.
They’re tired of having to explain themselves.
The good news is that I’m also finding that there are business leaders and organizations who understand the importance of mission-aligned partnerships. We don’t have to agree on everything. We don’t all have to share the same organizational structure or business model. But we do need partners who are willing to understand the mission, respect it, and work with us to translate that mission into the practical decisions organizations make every day.
That may be one of the biggest lessons I’ve taken from this past month.
Whether I was sitting with Catholic entrepreneurs at SENT, talking with students and business leaders at CUA, working through a plan-language challenge with a member, or talking with a health-plan leader like Phil Berry, the underlying question has been remarkably similar:
Are we being intentional about what we’re building?
Catholic organizations have a mission. Our challenge is to make sure that mission doesn’t get lost in the practical details of running the organization.
That includes our health plans.
That includes our business relationships.
And it includes the partners we choose to walk alongside us.
If you’ve experienced the challenge of trying to make your Catholic mission understood by a business partner, I’d like to hear about it. Those conversations help us understand where our members are—and where we can help.