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In today’s healthcare and health benefits landscape, confusion and skepticism are common. Complex plan designs, rising costs, and unclear language often leave employees unsure of what they are enrolling in or who they can trust. The Meridio Customer team exists to change that experience by providing clear, human support that helps people feel informed and confident in their healthcare decisions.
As part of the Meridio Customer team, benefit guides are licensed insurance agents who work directly with employees to explain plan options in straightforward, everyday language. They listen first, take individual needs and budgets into account, and stay available well beyond enrollment to answer questions about prescriptions, provider networks, and coverage details.
As Meridio’s Guide Team Manager, Susan leads our dedicated team of benefit guides and supports our customers and their families by helping them better understand health benefits, compare plan options, and feel confident in the decisions they make.
In conversations with Susan, one thing is clear: helping people understand their options and find the right benefits plan is what she enjoys most about her work. She and the Benefits Guide team focus on meeting customers where they are, simplifying complex insurance details, and providing hands-on support for any needs that arise. This people-first, education-driven approach reflects both Susan’s leadership style and the heart of Meridio culture.
Discover more about Susan in our complete Q&A below.
What is your role at Meridio?
I am the Benefits Guide Team Manager, and I also serve as a Benefits Guide. I work directly with customers to help them understand their health benefit options, while also supporting and leading our team of licensed agents.
How long have you been part of the Meridio team?
I joined Meridio in the fall of 2020 and have been with the company for more than five years.
How do you help support Meridio customers?
I work closely with customers as a direct point of contact, helping them make sense of their health benefit options. Our team focuses on explaining plans in everyday language so people can clearly understand what this coverage means for their families and finances. We intentionally avoid industry jargon and aim to make the process as simple and approachable as possible.
What do you enjoy most about your role?
The most rewarding part of my job is helping people and educating them. I enjoy breaking down complex benefits information so customers can feel confident that they are choosing coverage that works for both their needs and their budget.
What are some common questions customers ask, and how do you help?
Two of the most common questions I receive are whether a doctor is in network and whether prescriptions are covered. I help direct customers to where they can find and review the provider networks and prescription formularies. And for those who are not comfortable navigating online tools, I take the time to research that information for them.
What advice do you have for small business owners?
I always encourage small business owners to contribute toward employee premiums whenever possible. Even a small contribution can go a long way. I also find that payroll deductions are often easier for employees to manage than paying premiums directly, especially for those budgeting paycheck to paycheck.
What advice do you have for employees or anyone searching for benefits?
I advise people to look closely at deductibles, out of pocket maximums, and overall coverage details. It is important to choose a plan that fits your healthcare needs and financial situation, particularly in the event of a major or unexpected medical expense.
What do you enjoy doing outside of work?
Outside of work, I enjoy hiking and walking with my family and our dog, CC. I also love baking and regularly make sourdough bread, bagels, English muffins, and other homemade staples for my family.
Is there anything else you would like to share about Meridio?
Meridio is truly a group of people who care deeply about helping our clients. We are always willing to go the extra mile, and I am excited about our continued growth and the opportunity to introduce new products that will further support small businesses and their employees.
Since joining Meridio in the fall of 2020, Susan has helped guide the team through significant industry changes, all while maintaining a strong focus on education, empathy, and trust. Her passion and hands-on approach reflect what Meridio culture is all about: putting people first and doing the work the right way.
Learn more about the individuals behind Meridio and what drives our approach to healthcare and benefits by visiting: https://www.getmeridio.com/about-us
Discover how Meridio can help you build affordable, high-quality benefits for your business, reach out to our sales team for a free benefits assessment.
Bobby Sain, Meridio’s CEO, reflects on 2025, its challenges around the health insurance industry, and the impacts seen by small businesses. He also shares lessons learned at Meridio and how we’re taking them into 2026 with focus, optimism, and momentum, continuing to help small businesses nationwide offer more attainable and manageable benefits coverage.
If there is one thing that 2025 made clear, it's this: decisions around offering healthcare became harder, not easier, for small and mid-sized businesses. Quite simply, for many business owners, healthcare in 2025 wasn’t just expensive, it was exhausting.
At Meridio, we spent the year helping businesses across the country navigate these challenges and provide clarity relative to options for renewals, new plan structures, shifting regulations, and increasingly complex tradeoffs. We learned quite a bit, and more importantly, are applying those learnings to continue to be a valued partner to our customers in 2026 and beyond.
Small businesses have always faced unique challenges in healthcare but in 2025 the stakes rose sharply.
Health insurance costs continued to climb, while uncertainty around regulations, subsidies, provider networks, and long-term affordability became a constant backdrop for employers trying to support their teams while protecting their businesses. For those relying on the ACA marketplace, ongoing uncertainty around subsidies added even more financial and mental strain, raising concerns about the potential loss of support, tighter underwriting, and in some cases, reduced essential coverage.
Rising premiums strained cash flow, while employees felt the impact through higher deductibles and increased out-of-pocket costs. Many business owners found themselves weighing healthcare decisions against hiring plans, wage increases, or investments in growth.
At the same time, questions about the future of ACA subsidies (critical for businesses and individuals who depend on the marketplace) became impossible to ignore. For employers, “what happens next” wasn’t theoretical; it directly shaped how confidently they could plan, contribute, or expand benefits.
The reality for small businesses in 2025 was clear: healthcare decisions carried lasting consequences, the margin for error continued to shrink, and understanding what truly changed and what it means going forward became essential.
First, cost pressure intensified and risk moved closer to employers. Whether through higher deductibles, alternative funding models, or tighter underwriting, more financial responsibility landed on employers and their employees. For small businesses, this meant greater exposure to volatility and fewer opportunities to “absorb” surprises. The result wasn’t better cost control, it was more financial anxiety for employers and their employees.
Second, healthcare “choice” expanded but clarity lagged behind. SMBs were increasingly asked to choose between complex structures without clear guidance on what the options were, how they worked, and the tradeoffs. More options didn’t lead to better decisions, they led to paralysis. And the systems that serve these markets, namely brokers, were taxed with limited time and resources to create clarity out of this complexity for all of their clients.
Transparency improved but understanding didn’t always follow. Price tools, provider directories, and plan comparisons became more common, and now with the prevalence of AI entering every facet of our lives, more “intelligent” systems are available to help make it easier to understand. But transparency without context left business owners unsure how costs will actually play out.
Finally, alternative options like self-funding became more mainstream for SMBs. What was once considered niche is now a serious consideration for many 20-100 person small businesses. The challenge wasn’t access, it was education. SMBs needed help understanding not just what these options were, but when they made sense.
Across all of these changes, one theme stood out: small businesses didn’t need more complexity, they needed a partner to help navigate and manage it.
Meridio exists for a simple reason: small businesses deserve access to healthcare strategies that are understandable, affordable, and aligned with their goals.
We continue to build and optimize our offering to help small businesses nationwide across industries, growth stages, and geographies to help them navigate healthcare decisions without becoming experts themselves. Our mission is to simplify the complexity, curate the best options for each of our customer’s situations, and help businesses understand the coverage tradeoffs based on their unique situation and priorities.
As the health insurance landscape grew more complex in 2025, more small businesses relied on Meridio than ever before, reflecting both rising market challenges and the trust our customers place in us as their benefits partner.
This year reinforced several lessons that shaped how we serve our small business customers, nationwide.
Business leaders don’t want infinite choice, they want confidence. Employers want to know they’re making the right decision for their business and their teams, not just choosing from a long list of plans. They want to understand they’re getting a square deal amongst the noise.
Affordability matters but sustainability matters more. Short-term savings without long-term understanding often leads to regret. Businesses value partners who help them think beyond the next cycle and are reliable for the long-term.
Education is as important as access. Providing options isn’t enough. Businesses need help understanding risk, contribution strategies, and employee experience without jargon or pressure. The best decision should be natural, not forced.
Healthcare expertise should live with the partner, not the employer. Business owners don’t want to become benefits specialists but they do want the outcome that benefits specialization provides. They want someone they trust to manage complexity on their behalf in a sustainable and modern way.
These lessons pushed us to work harder, dig deeper, and refine how we curate and present health spending for our customers.
In response to these realities, Meridio made meaningful progress in 2025.
We expanded and refined our product offerings to better meet small business needs across different sizes, industries, and risk profiles. We invested in tools and frameworks that help employers evaluate affordability, value, and risk rather than focusing on surface-level comparisons alone.
We also grew our internal team to better serve our fast growing and evolving customer base, bringing on experienced professionals, engineers and designers, who share a commitment to serving our customers with clarity and integrity. As demand increased, we stayed focused on maintaining high-touch support and thoughtful guidance, not just scale for scale’s sake.
Most importantly, we doubled down on our role as a trusted partner, helping businesses understand why a health plan offering makes sense for their team and their business, not just what it costs.
Looking ahead, our focus is clear.
We will continue to curate the best healthcare options for small businesses: not just the most affordable, but the right ones.
We will deepen our efforts to educate employers on the paths available to them, clearly explaining tradeoffs so decisions align with business goals and employee needs.
We will continue managing risk and complexity on behalf of our customers, recognizing SMBs don’t need to be healthcare experts. That’s our responsibility.
And we will stay disciplined about what we take on, ensuring every initiative supports our mission of making healthcare more understandable and sustainable for small businesses.
Healthcare will continue to evolve. Regulations will shift. Costs will fluctuate, and new models will emerge.
Through it all, small businesses will still need a steady knowledgeable partner—one that understands the health benefits system, acknowledges its flaws, and works to deliver the best possible outcome with the tools available.
Healthcare reform doesn’t happen all at once. It happens quietly through better decisions made by employers who finally understand the system thereby creating attrition against busted models that fade away in favor of something better. Something clearer. Something you trust.
At Meridio, we want to make health affordable and accessible and we want to do that by helping business leaders and their teams improve their health spending through smarter buying power. We believe in that mission and are excited to build towards that better future.
Our team is here to assist you in navigating the benefits ecosystem uncertainty and analyze the options available to your business based on your company goals and employee needs. If you’d like to learn more about our strategic approach and plan offerings, reach out for a quick 30 minute call today.
New York, NY. June 6th, 2025 - Meridio, a leading provider of healthcare as a managed service for small businesses, today announced the appointment of Larry Dunivan as their newest Board Member. Dunivan brings over four decades of executive leadership experience in technology and human capital management to support Meridio's continued growth and innovation in the healthcare services sector serving small businesses.
"We are thrilled to welcome Larry Dunivan to our Board of Directors," said Bobby Sain, Chief Executive Officer at Meridio. "His extensive experience as an operator, and developing companies in the Human Capital Management space, as well as his strategic vision will be a great asset as we continue to grow in the coming years.”
Dunivan most recently serves as Founder at Cefalo Group and serves on the Board of Directors at Pay Federate, an AI-driven solution for compensation. With a focus on intuitive design and seamless integration, Payfederate simplifies the complexities of compensation, ensuring transparency and fairness
In addition to this, he holds a position on the Board at Asurint, a background screening company that uses technology and innovation to deliver fast and accurate results. Honing in on team development and business expansion across the software industry.
"I'm honored to join Meridio's Board at such a pivotal time in healthcare delivery transformation," said Dunivan. "Small businesses face unique challenges in providing quality healthcare benefits to their employees, and Meridio's innovative approach is addressing this critical need. I look forward to contributing to the company's mission of making comprehensive healthcare accessible and affordable."
WIth a passion for developing strong leadership and interpersonal development, Dunivan brings invaluable insight to Meridio’s future growth. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Northwestern University, where he went on to continue his studies in Accounting and Information Technology earning his Masters of Business Administration.
Dunivan's appointment comes as Meridio continues to expand its healthcare management services designed specifically for small businesses seeking enterprise-level healthcare solutions without the associated complexity and cost. Learn more about Meridio at www.getmeridio.com
For more information please contact Jen Taylor, Director of Marketing at 929-412-1921 or email jtaylor@getmeridio.com
It all started while building a company in the hospitality space, my cofounder and I discovered a world of unsolved problems in offering health care benefits.
In 2015, building a platform that allowed customers to tap into workers on-demand seemed like an obvious need in the market. We called it Waitron, after the title given to me and my fellow waiters and waitresses at the restaurant where I worked in college.
Hospitality-focused businesses could connect to hospitality staff in-real time. Why did this solution not exist in the market? If a restaurant was short-staffed, they needed a trained worker immediately, not in two days. If a catering company was brought in for a last-minute wedding, who was going to bartend during the second electric slide?
It was painfully clear that someone needed to build this solution. “Uber-for-X” was everywhere in 2015, so building an Uber for waiters and bartenders was the next step in the product-market-fit growth cycle that entrepreneurs such as myself shamelessly mimicked. The problem was obvious. Or so we thought.
It turns out, the problem of figuring out how to connect a business to a worker was a simple one to solve. Give the customer a tool to book a service. Give the workers performing that service clear information on where to be and what to do. Make sure the person buying can pay, and make sure the person performing the service can earn an income. How revolutionary we thought we were, connecting a buyer with a seller? True brilliance.
But, what happened after the customer booked a worker? That is where the actual problems began.
In fact, how did these workers access benefits before we came along?
During year 3 of building Waitron, it was the last question over which I became obsessed. It led to the question that built Meridio - how do workers, in this future of work that the world is building, gain access to benefits?
We spent 4 years building Waitron and ultimately sold it to Qwick in 2019 - 4 months prior to the pandemic. Starting in 2019, while building up Waitron for a sale, I consumed everything I could about worksite insurance.
Again, many questions and very few answers. It felt familiar. We knew we were on to something. In 2019 we thought that the world was moving toward mobile and remote. In 2020, it needed to; the world changed.
In-person enrollment conditions were getting harder to come by, employees were lacking knowledge of what insurance they should buy and what it did when they bought it. We found that only 48% of employees actually understood the benefits they purchased - that is 92 million people in the United States.
It was becoming too expensive for employers to offer healthcare, and too cumbersome for employers to offer supplemental insurance in a way their employees could understand. SaaS-focused insurance enrollments were being built to move as much product out the door as possible while providing little guidance to the employee. The occasional read-along material and corporate instructional videos were all that the market had provided for employees making these significant financial decisions.
This new world needed a better benefits experience for every stakeholder: the employee, the employer, the broker, and the carrier. It needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. Enter Meridio.
At Meridio, we are reimagining what it means to connect people with benefits. Using the thinking from our Waitron days, we match employees up with licensed experts, called Benefit Guides, in real-time so they can make benefits decisions with unbiased guidance. No pushy commission-based insurance enrollers. No complex benefits jargon.
Employees simply receive expert insight to help them make better benefits decisions in a world that is becoming more complex.
For Carriers, Meridio provides a purpose-built experience that helps them deliver an edge for their brokers, clients, and partners. Our platform gives carriers a superpower so their distribution network can reach customers anywhere, anytime, while we manage the complexity of payments, terminations, and compliance.
For Brokers, Meridio provides an enrollment solution so they can create value for their clients without the headache of traditional enrollment companies and with the ability to enroll benefits anywhere in the country at the same rate as an in-person agent.
Society is building a world that people have dreamed about for centuries. This new world is complex but it also has freedom we have never seen before. Freedom to move around, freedom of choice, and freedom to explore. But with that freedom, we need guidance from unbiased experts so we can make the best decision possible. Meridio’s platform is a trusted advisor for this new world to deliver a better benefits experience for everyone involved.
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