Health care costs in the United States are projected to see their steepest rise in over a decade during 2025, with multiple industry analyses forecasting increases between 7% and 8% year-over-year (see table below). However, MedBen offers solutions that directly address the top drivers of health care spend… solutions that have resulted in a per-member trend of just 2.8% from October 2020 to September 2024.
In these analyses, employers cite a variety of factors that are accelerating cost growth, including:
- Rising medical costs as more Americans have sought post-pandemic care after delaying treatment.
- Higher utilization due to chronic health conditions, which, again, were in many cases neglected during COVID.
- The growth of multi-million-dollar claims for cancers, cardiovascular disease, transplants, and premature babies.
- And the single greatest driver of health care cost increases, prescription drug spending – in particular, increased use of expensive specialty medications, GLP-1s to treat obesity, and emerging gene and cellular therapies.
Another common theme to these analyses: Employers are considering potential fixes to these health care cost spikes – preferably ones that don’t shift more of the burden to plan members.
MedBen delivers savings solutions that benefit employer and plan member alike, such as:
- Forensic claims review that has achieved an average 47% in additional savings on targeted claims;
- Alternative reimbursement strategies like direct-to-employer contracting and Fair Market Reimbursement that outperform traditional PPO plans alone by 19.6%;
- A proactive wellness approach, saving MedBen WellLiving clients an average of 6.3% on claims compared to non-WellLiving clients; and
- MedBen Rx pharmacy solutions that use transparent drug pricing to save clients 18.1% on average compared to their previous PBMs.
If you haven’t done so, we encourage you to read this year’s MedBen Client Report. In it, you’ll find proven solutions as well as innovations that have helped our clients consistently stay below national cost trends. It includes a checklist that summarizes the many dynamic services we offer… just contact your broker or call MedBen VP of Sales & Marketing Brian Fargus at 888-627-8683 to get more information about any (or all) of them.