About
46 North Benefit Advisors exists because Indiana units of government are buying the second-largest line in their budgets without anyone in the room whose only job is to represent the unit.
Spend a year reading Indiana public benefits filings and a pattern shows up that is hard to unsee. The units with the most exposure have the least advisory capacity. A township trustee negotiates against a carrier’s renewal actuary. A county with four hundred employees has no one who has read its own pharmacy contract. A school corporation facing a structural revenue loss has never once put its benefits programme out to bid, because that is simply not how it has ever been done.
None of that is anyone’s misconduct. It is what happens when a market has no independent party in it. Brokers are generally paid by the outcome they are recommending. Pooled arrangements retain a single consultant at the pool level, which structurally means nobody is paid to tell an individual member it could do better elsewhere. The unit itself has a clerk with eleven other jobs.
So the firm is narrow on purpose. Indiana only. Public employers only. Paid by the unit, in a number disclosed before the work starts. We would rather be the only party at the table with nothing to sell than the fourth party with something.
Before taking a single engagement we assembled the landscape database described in our Method — every Indiana unit of government, its filed disbursements, salaries and benefits, its adopted budget, and where a public document states it, its vendors. That work came first because advice without a defensible baseline is just opinion, and a public body has no shortage of opinions available to it for free.
It also produced the rule the whole practice runs on. Roughly seven in ten Indiana civil units produce a benefits figure we will not quote, for reasons set out in full on the method page. Publishing them anyway would have made a bigger database and a smaller firm.
Founder
Andrew founded 46 North after a year spent inside Indiana public benefits data — building the landscape database, filing public records requests, and reading the contracts that units of government had signed without independent review. The firm is the direct result of what that year turned up.
How we work
Indiana’s SEA 3 imposes fiduciary duties on third party administrators and pharmacy benefit managers, not on brokers. We take the same four duties on in the engagement letter anyway, before the first meeting.
What it costs: it removes every compensation arrangement that depends on not being explained.
Where a unit’s filings will not support a figure, we say so and print nothing rather than publishing something that falls apart under questioning.
What it costs: most of the database. Roughly seven in ten civil units produce a benefits figure we will not quote.
A carrier, administrator or pharmacy benefit manager is reported where a public document states it. Anything we have inferred is labelled as inferred, every time.
What it costs: a great deal of certainty we could otherwise imply.
If a unit is genuinely well served where it is, that is the finding, and it is worth having in writing for a council that will ask.
What it costs: the engagement, occasionally. It is still the right answer.
A bearing of 46 degrees is not north. It is close enough to look like north, and wrong enough to put you somewhere else entirely by the end of the walk. Most benefits programmes drift by about that much, a little each renewal, until nobody can say how they got where they are. The job is to find the fixed point and measure from it.