Brown Deer board authorizes staff to pursue self-funded health plan for 2026

The Village of Brown Deer Board of Trustees voted unanimously on June 2 to authorize village staff to work with benefits broker Brown and Brown to initiate a self-funded health insurance model for plan year 2026.

Brown and Brown lead consultant Alex Lewinsky and account representative Andrew Williamson gave a roughly 40-minute presentation explaining how self-funding would shift claims risk from a carrier to the village while relying on stop‑loss reinsurance to cap catastrophic exposure. "When you're self funded, liability remains with the village," Lewinsky said, explaining that the village would still purchase stop‑loss coverage to limit large-dollar claims.

The presentation outlined two common approaches: traditional self‑funding, which exposes the employer to month‑to‑month claim volatility but returns underwriting gains to the employer over time, and level‑funded plans, which smooth monthly payments. Brown and Brown estimated that, under conservative assumptions, a self‑funded approach could have produced roughly…