Employer-sponsored health insurance. Coverage tied to the job.
It is a financial instrument.
It exists to relieve Lose the parents' health coverage before earning your own and A hospital birth is a five-figure invoice. That is the whole reason it is here: nothing enters this map without a human problem behind it.
It could not exist without Insurance regulation, Actuarial science and Tax code. These are the quiet preconditions — remove any one and the solution stops working.
Solving that problem created new ones: Leaving the job means losing coverage. Follow those and you find the next generation of products built on top of this one.
6 organisations in this map sell it, 5 of them publicly listed.
Its neighbourhood
Everything this entry connects to directly. Click any point to follow it.
The line back to a human being
2 hops from a person at a phase of life. The further a thing sits from the person, the more abstract it looks — and the more it tends to be mistaken for something that came from nowhere.
- SolutionEmployer-sponsored health insurance
- FrictionLose the parents' health coverage before earning your own
- Life phaseEarly adulthood
- Rooted inSafety
- Rooted inScarce resources
Relieves
Created these new problems
Second-order frictions. This is where most of the modern economy actually lives.
Requires
Who sells it
| Organisation | Value | Type | Products |
|---|---|---|---|
| UnitedHealth Group | $300B | public · UNH | employer and individual plans, Medicare Advantage, Optum Rx PBM |
| Cigna Group | $85B | public · CI | Express Scripts PBM, employer health plans |
| Elevance Health | $80B | public · ELV | Anthem Blue Cross plans, Medicaid managed care, CarelonRx |
| CVS Health (Aetna | $80B | public · CVS | Aetna plans, Caremark PBM, CVS Pharmacy |
| MetLife | $55B | public · MET | group life, disability, dental |
| Gusto | $9.5B | private | small-business payroll and benefits |