Health Care Cost Spike Will Continue to Bedevil Employers

Entering 2024, growing health care costs are the main worry of employer plan sponsors, according to industry experts. To cope with the problem, those experts add, employers may seek novel benefit designs, while also reaching for tried-and-true cost control methodologies like narrower networks. 

Brokerage WTW found in a September survey that 69% of surveyed large employers listed health care costs as a “top health and wellbeing priority” over the next three years, and that health care costs were the most frequently named priority by respondents. 

“I think that the emphasis on cost is actually bigger now than it was a few years ago,” says Jeff Levin-Scherz, M.D., population health lead at WTW and an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.