Reimagining the individual market: Why the future of ICHRA belongs to the employee

By David Millar – Head of Product, Gravie ICHRA

As an ICHRA product builder, one question keeps me up at night: What happens to members when they transition from a group plan to the individual market?

For me, that experience is the key measure of success. And if it’s overwhelming, confusing, or purely transactional, we’ve failed. I believe ICHRA must combine the personalized freedom of the individual market with the support and familiarity of a group plan. Getting that right comes down to three things: a member experience that supports people from the first plan they shop to the bills they pay all year, an administrative model that gives HR back its time, and compliance handled so well it never surfaces. These principles shape everything we build at Gravie.

Choice overload is real, but there’s a way out.

The options on the individual market can be overwhelming, even paralyzing. I know from personal experience. When I had to make the transition from a group plan to an ICHRA, I relied on the expertise of others to guide me through the experience. During that time, I built my own decision tool to evaluate the choices to make sure they actually met my family’s health needs. And that’s when it hit me: there’s a better way to transition to ICHRA—and we were uniquely positioned to build it.

Our Gravie Care team has spent years meeting members where they are, asking the right questions, and guiding them to the right fit— and we’ve used those insights to build a shopping tool members can use to quickly filter and surface two to three plans with the features they really need to make comparisons (and decisions) easier.

Guided enrollment bridges the confidence gap.

ICHRA sits at the perilous regulatory intersection of the IRS, health insurance, and banking. Technology excels at mapping this complexity: tracking dependencies, flagging gaps, flowing users through a structured process. But, it also requires a human layer, one that our Gravie Care Advisors—and their years of experience and insights—comprise. They’re what makes our technology powerful and why our customers can feel confident about their decisions.

The benefits journey doesn’t stop at enrollment.

If employees don’t know how to use their plan after they enroll, that’s on us. Employers, brokers, Gravie, and our partners across the ICHRA ecosystem all have a role to play in education—and members need to be made active participants. We’re doing that by building the platform that gets at their real concerns.

One of the great transitions I see coming in ICHRA is the move beyond “pick your plan at the start of the year” to ongoing, year-round education on how to use your plan—maximizing available benefits while reducing out-of-pocket costs in real time. That’s the outcome that matters.

Letting HR focus on the human aspect of their jobs.

HR administrators are stretched thin, and that stress has a way of trickling down to the employees they’re trying to support. We’ve spent a lot of time on the backend to develop real-time reporting, seamless payments, and cleaner implementation processes that remove much of  the administrative burden and free up HR pros to focus on people.

Taking compliance out of the footnotes.

If there’s one big concern about ICHRA, it’s compliance. And for us, that’s not something to manage around; it’s something to nerd out over.

The rules—and there are a lot of them—exist for good reason. We’ve studied the regulatory landscape deeply enough that we can thread the needle between rigor and experience. And as certified ICHRA nerds, we make that airtight compliance as invisible to members as it is to employers.

Health benefits shouldn’t have to mean making tradeoffs.

The truth is, budget flexibility for the business and peace of mind for the employees can coexist, if you build the right product.

By bringing the support and familiarity of a group plan into a frictionless ICHRA experience, we’re not just administering a program. We’re trying to set a better, more human standard for what modern health benefits can be.

For more of our thoughts on ICHRA, read our 2026 ICHRA forecast and check out Ari Bellin’s advice for switching ICHRA administrators.

If you’d like to discuss what ICHRA could look like for your clients, get in touch.