Every raise in your company gets approved. Someone proposes it, someone signs off, finance models it. That is how spending works.
Except one line. Every year, your health plan reprices the cost of employing every single person on your payroll. No proposal. No sign-off. A renewal letter shows up and the number is just… different. (Higher. The number is higher.)
Drift is not a decision. It costs like one.
A raise is a decision. Trend is drift, and drift compounds: a plan trending 8 percent a year doubles in nine years. Nobody in your building approved that. Everyone in your building pays for it – you in margin, your employees in deductions that quietly eat their raises. Sorry – that openly eat their raises. There is nothing subtle about it.
The strange part: we treat it like weather. A 12 percent increase gets a groan, a budget line adjustment, and a “see you next year.” Imagine your freight vendor or your software supplier repricing 12 percent annually, on autopilot, while everyone shrugged.
The repricing happens upstream
That number gets built from things you never see: network contracts, pharmacy pricing, intermediary incentives that reward higher spend. The people assembling it do not work for you. Opacity is the business model, and your annual increase is its invoice.
Make it a decision again
Employers who control this spend treat the health plan like a managed cost, not a fixed one. They see what drives the number: what the contracts actually say, what the pharmacy actually costs, who gets paid what along the way. Then they decide – structure, funding, vendors – the way they decide everything else in the building.
Your workforce got repriced this year. The only question is whether you were part of the decision or just on the distribution list.
Want to see what actually drives your number? Book a 30-minute review. [LINK]
