November included an unexpected upheaval in my personal life, and my (lack of) blog posts here showed it. I’m pleased to report, however, that things have now settled down and that I’m back!
The question is: back to what?
My answer is: the original purpose of this site was to help non-benefits experts understand what’s going on with their employee benefits.
Back when I was in a direct contact role, I lost count of the number of times I explained something to someone and they responded, “oh, that makes sense! I guess I’m just too stupid to figure all of this stuff out.”
I would never let that comment lie. My answer was always the same: no, you’re not too stupid to figure it out. What you are is a/an [insert job title here], not a benefits specialist. Understanding all this is my job, not yours. If I tried to do yours, it’d be something of a disaster.
That’s the first point I want to emphasize to readers of this blog: you are not incapable. You just don’t spend all your working hours in the employee benefits world the way I do — which is entirely appropriate, since you’re supposed to spend those hours on whatever you were actually hired to do!
The second point I want to bring up is that there are a lot of other benefits blogs out there. Many of them make for fascinating reading for me as a benefits specialist. That’s because those blogs are written for other benefit specialists to read; or, in other words, I’m a part of the target audience.
The one thing I have not found is a benefits blog that was written for people who aren’t benefit specialists. That’s the niche I’m attempting to fill with this one.
The idea actually began with what was, at that point, my Twitter feed. I had taken to posting links to articles and sites I found interesting, and many of them were actually written with a general audience in mind. Information for consumers, versus specialists, is actually out there; it’s just fragmented and hard to find. It also often lacks the fuller context needed to understand why whatever’s going on is happening.
For a lot of fields, that doesn’t matter. My life is not directly affected by innovations in power line construction, new releases of container organization systems, original research in sports medicine, or any number of things that are going on in others’ fields.
Employee benefits, on the other hand, does affect peoples’ lives directly, every day. From the employee who’s trying to understand the difference in their health plan options, to the one who’s facing a high-four-figure dental bill, to the one who doesn’t understand why 401(k) plans are so popular, people face decisions about their benefits every single day. Making such decisions isn’t always easy, and can even be a little scary, when you’re not as conversant with employee benefits as a person who does it for a living.
That was where the idea to expand my Twitter feed into a blog came from. I’m now primarily using Bluesky instead of Twitter/X, but the idea itself is unchanged. My purpose in writing this blog is to provide a resource for those who are affected by benefits, but don’t have time to spend trying to understand everything. It’s also for those who don’t understand why things are set up the way they are, and would like to know more.
Unlike the other blogs I’ve found, the primary target for this blog is not my fellow benefits specialists. I welcome their input and comments, but the point is to make employee benefits make sense for everyone else. In fact, that is where the name of the blog — Making it Make Sense — came from.
I’ve also taken to referring to it as Benefit MIMS, so you can use that too if you want.
My final point is that this blog isn’t going to spend a lot of time tracking legislation or posting opinions. While I may sometimes express an opinion, my two-plus decades in the field have taught me to focus on the way things are, not the way I think they should be.
To be clear, I do have political opinions, particularly as they relate to the business of health care. Quite honestly, it’s impossible to work in this field and not develop opinions about this particular mess. It’s also impossible not to have at least some biases — and I’m openly political on Bluesky itself. So I can’t promise I will never be biased or opinionated.
There are many well-written blogs out there, from multiple viewpoints and positions, that talk about the way things should be. I read them on a regular basis as a part of keeping myself informed about industry trends. But the point of this blog is to explain things, not to wade into those debates. It’s my hope that, as its content begins to develop, that I can accomplish that goal.