Christian Roduner grew up in Rossville, Kansas, a farming town with one stoplight that never turns green and a high school class of thirty-five. He graduated with no job offers, nearly enlisted, and scraped into a junior college baseball roster at the last minute. Five years later he's a junior partner at Apollo Insurance Group in Lee's Summit, running health insurance for families and small businesses and trying to be the Roduner who changes the trajectory of a last name he calls cursed.
What You'll Hear
- Why Christian says next year's health insurance market will be World War III in the office
- What the American Rescue Act did to marketplace premiums and what repealing it means for families
- Growing up in Rossville, Kansas with one stoplight that never turns green
- The text message from a high school coach that redirected him from enlisting to junior college baseball
- Why pre-existing conditions are the biggest demon in private health insurance shopping
- The 75 percent of bankruptcies caused by medical bills stat that lives in the back of his mind
- How residual commission income stacks after the eighteen to twenty four month mark
- Why Aetna is leaving the marketplace next year and how carriers come and go based on federal subsidies
A junior partner running the health insurance brokerage side of Apollo
Christian's title at Apollo Insurance Group is junior partner, one of seven who essentially run the company. Apollo is a health insurance brokerage based in downtown Lee's Summit. Christian's day to day isn't only selling. He manages agents, trains them, and teaches them how to speak insurance and how to hold a conversation. Most of the hires come in between twenty one and thirty years old. Christian will be twenty eight this year, so he isn't calling himself an experienced leader on age alone. He's been doing the work every day since he walked out of Emporia State.
Apollo writes dental, vision, life, and more, but health insurance is Christian's primary lane. It's also the one, he says, where people hear the phrase and immediately check out. Screw that, I don't want anything to do with it. He gets why. Health insurance is the type of insurance that changes most, because the administration in Washington affects it farther and faster than almost any other line.
His phrasing on the job is plain. Teach agents how to speak insurance. Shape them into professional young individuals. Hold a conversation. He isn't describing a pitch script. He's describing how to earn the kind of trust someone gives you before they put their family's medical coverage on your license number. That relational posture is the quiet thread running under everything else he talks about, from small town upbringing to the marketplace carriers he watches come and go.
The conversation starts here because it has to. Everything downstream, the small town roots, the near enlistment, the late baseball walk on offer, the residual commission math, makes more sense once you understand that Christian is describing a job where trust is the whole asset and everything else is a byproduct.
The healthcare marketplace, the American Rescue Act, and what next year looks like
Ask Christian where health insurance is going and his short answer is that next year will be crazy. The longer answer is that it'll eventually plateau, but the next open enrollment window is going to be rough. The reason traces back to the American Rescue Act, a Biden era COVID relief law that expanded the premium tax credit pool that subsidizes marketplace plans. Under that expansion, a family of four making one hundred thousand dollars got significantly more assistance, so their actual monthly premiums came down.
Trump, Christian says, has now pitched that law. Rates next year are going to climb, and nobody knows exactly how much. He compares the current situation to his first year in insurance, before the American Rescue Act went into effect. Back then a bottom line bronze plan for a family at one hundred thousand dollars of income could run seven to eight hundred dollars a month, more if they were older. After the expansion, people were picking up plans for two hundred dollars. He doesn't think we snap back to the seven to eight hundred number, but he's bracing for real pain.
His description of late October, right before open enrollment, is worth hearing. He calls it the window shopping era, when he works one hundred hours a week, and he flatly predicts this open enrollment will feel like World War III in the office. He doesn't glamorize it. He explains it as the structural reality of a market where every carrier's offerings, every subsidy calculation, and every client's premium can change year over year based on what the federal government does.
This is the part of the episode where listeners shopping health insurance for themselves or for a small business should lean in. Christian isn't making a political point. He's giving a practical forecast: premiums go up meaningfully next year, and people who assume their plan will auto renew at the same price are going to be surprised. The right move is to start the conversation early, not after your renewal letter lands.
Carriers come and go: why Aetna is leaving and how the subsidy math drives it
Christian makes a point that most consumers never hear. Health insurance carriers aren't fixed. They come and go from the marketplace every year, and the reason is almost always financial. When he says Aetna is leaving the marketplace next year, he isn't speculating, he's telling clients so they can plan. Bright Health left. Cigna left Missouri. More will follow. More will also show up.
The mechanism he describes is straightforward. Every carrier on the marketplace files for what amounts to a subsidy allotment. The federal government looks at the carrier's financials and decides how much in tax dollars it will allow to flow toward paying down that carrier's premiums. If the allotment shrinks or the financial math breaks, the carrier pulls out of a state or the entire marketplace. This happens on a yearly cycle, and it's why Christian says he sometimes has to move fifteen to twenty percent of his current block of business to a whole new carrier when a local hospital contract or a carrier's rate structure changes suddenly.
He walks through a recent real example. St Luke's, where his fiancee works, was acquired by BJC. The contracts between those two medical systems and their respective insurance carriers turned into what he calls a racket sport. One system stopped taking certain plans, and Christian had to move clients to keep their doctors in network. This is the part of the job the public never sees, and it's the part that makes a broker worth having. Nobody shopping on healthcare.gov at eleven at night on December fourteenth is tracking which hospital system just cut which contract with which carrier.
For small business owners and self employed people, the lesson is concrete. The plan you're on this year may not exist next year under the same name, same network, and same price. When Christian tells a client to let him know when life changes, he's also watching the carrier landscape in the background so the client doesn't have to.
Pre-existing conditions, HMO versus PPO networks, and the marketplace reimbursement problem
Christian calls pre-existing conditions the biggest demon in health insurance shopping, and the explanation he gives is one of the clearest short breakdowns of the current system you'll hear. On the marketplace, every pre-existing condition is covered. If you had cancer last week and you're in remission and it returns, the plan pays. That consumer protection didn't exist before 2010, and it's the single biggest reason marketplace premiums look the way they do today.
Private carriers off the marketplace operate differently. Some don't cover any pre-existing conditions at all. Others use what Christian calls a two year look back period, where they review your medical history for the last twenty four months and decide what counts as pre-existing. His own meniscus surgery fifteen years ago, for instance, would be excluded under some carriers but covered under others if he tore it again. Little nuances like that aren't in the marketing. They're in the two hundred page policy document most people will never open.
He also pulls back the curtain on a financial mechanic most consumers don't think about. Marketplace plans typically run on HMO or EPO networks. Those networks reimburse providers at rates much closer to the Medicare baseline. Group plans through an employer usually run on PPO networks with higher reimbursement percentages. Christian gives a rough illustration: a marketplace plan with a given carrier might require a hospital to bill something like sixteen thousand percent of the Medicare reimbursement rate to make a profit, while a group plan on the same carrier might only require about one hundred fifty five percent. Providers get paid faster and better on the group side, so the network access and service quality feel different even when the insurance card looks similar.
The takeaway isn't that marketplace plans are bad. It's that the questions you have to ask are different depending on where you're shopping. Is the hospital system you use actually in network? Does this carrier look back two years or fifteen on pre-existing conditions? Is this a real PPO or a branded HMO? Christian treats those questions as the entire job.
Residual income, the eighteen month wall, and why insurance produces wealth
The second half of the conversation turns from health insurance policy to the career inside of it. Christian didn't plan to sell insurance. He finished at Emporia State with an information systems degree, interviewed for help desk roles and at Northwestern Mutual, and was a month from graduation with no job. An old teammate put him in touch with Apollo's sales director. One interview, a ten out of ten yes, and he was in. Five years later he's a junior partner.
What kept him there is the residual structure. Apollo gives new agents a stipend for the first few months, then transitions them to commission. New agents pay back the stipend from commissions over time. The average first full year income for an agent is around forty thousand dollars. After that, he says, it typically doubles and triples year over year. By the eighteen to twenty four month mark, the stack of renewal commissions is big enough that the job economics flip entirely.
Christian is blunt about the attrition curve. If you know by month three to six that you aren't bought in, leave and find a different career. If you're still questioning it at twelve months, you've wasted a year. If you bail before eighteen months, you're going to kick yourself, because the payoff comes right after. He ate peanut butter, jelly, and ramen for roughly twenty four months to get through the first stretch. He wasn't unusual in that. The filter is part of the model.
Open enrollment is where the math accelerates. Christian estimates Apollo books about seventy five percent of an agent's next year income in a roughly sixty day window. He had the best open enrollment in the company in his third year and describes the moment it hit as the job becoming almost fun, the point where closing deals happens left, right, and center, and the stack grows faster than it used to. He's now to the point where he works entirely off referrals. He keeps coming back to a simple statistic that frames why the job matters to him: roughly seventy five percent of personal bankruptcies are caused by medical bills. If he treats people right, he has work for life. If he doesn't, he shouldn't.
About Christian Roduner
Christian Roduner is a junior partner at Apollo Insurance Group, a health insurance brokerage in downtown Lee's Summit. He focuses on health insurance and also writes dental, vision, and life coverage. He grew up in Rossville, Kansas, played junior college baseball at Colby Community College, transferred to Emporia State, and joined Apollo right out of school. Five years in, he manages agents, trains new hires, and works primarily off referrals. He's engaged to his fiancee Annabel and getting married in late April of next year. Apollo Insurance Group