The most difficult time to learn about your health insurance is during a personal health crisis. Unfortunately, that’s the position Laura Maly found herself in as she navigated a high-risk pregnancy and difficult birth.
Maly is co-founder of Wonderist, a dental marketing agency based in San Diego, California. Wonderist Agency provides branding, website design, and social media to dentists trying to grow their private practices. Few dentists have the bandwidth to handle marketing, though it’s vital to running a small business. For Maly, Wonderist is a family affair, originally created at her kitchen table and co-founded with Michael Anderson, now her husband. Since then, the business has grown exponentially and serves more than 800 dentists throughout the United States.
Benefits support when it’s needed most
As Maly and Anderson scaled their business, expanding office spaces — and their family — she wasn’t focused on changing her broker or Wonderist’s employee benefits plans. Her team seemed satisfied and her family was set up with in-network providers. She also had yet to make her first human resources hire and wore several hats at the agency.
Then everything changed.
Early into her pregnancy with their third child, Maly was asked to prepare for three possible outcomes, all of them difficult and heartbreaking. One scenario was that the baby would need a heart transplant and she didn’t know how something like that would be covered by insurance. To learn, she reached out to an acquaintance she’d kept in touch with from her brokerage, who had since left to join Nava.
“My life turned into a bunch of doctor appointments and we put our whole life on hold,” Maly shared. “I asked for help and she walked me through my insurance plan and introduced me to a few more people from Nava who helped me evaluate whether we needed a secondary insurance plan.”
The right time to change brokers
Against the odds, Maly’s third child was born and presented a new, fourth scenario: after a few hours, her health was stable enough to breastfeed, and within a few days, go home. Months later, Maly’s daughter had open-heart surgery and is thriving. But the family’s journey through the medical system continues.
During all this, Maly decided to switch brokers because she was moved by Nava’s investment in her family’s well-being even though she was not a client. She’d recently hired a dedicated HR and finance specialist at Wonderist who could help manage a transition, which she noted was seamless.
“It’s a miraculous story, and the Nava team has been there through it all,” Maly shared. “They’ve been incredible supports helping me understand the system. At one point I had a stack of bills and asked, ‘Do I even owe this money?’ I’d spent so much already and just paid the bills when they arrived, without knowing what I was paying for.”
Nava took the bills and “pieced them together like a forensic scientist,” she said. The result was a spreadsheet that showed what she owed, and what she didn’t, and they’ve worked together to reconcile bills and get money back. As an example of the discrepancies found, a routine flu shot, which should have been free, was coded under her daughter’s heart condition, giving it an expensive copay.
“How many times have things like this happened to all of us? Probably a million,” Maly said. “My Nava partner is an incredible resource for me, educating me so that I can advocate for our family and finances.”
Partners in business, and health
Since then, the Nava team found a critical illness claim form to help Maly’s family recoup additional costs. “I wouldn’t have even known about something like this,” she said. “I am now very motivated to help others where I can, with what I’ve learned, and to extend that to our employees.”
Maly credits Nava as being “a tremendous help” throughout a difficult time in her personal life, while also serving as “an incredible service provider and teammate for my HR team and my business. I’m so very grateful,” she said. “I have nothing but wonderful things to say.”
