HR and finance teams need tighter alliances to attack healthcare costs

If you want to get rising healthcare costs under control at your organization, you might need to…dun dun dun…meet with HR.

There’s a major disconnect going on: 94% of CFOs think there’s a clear “tipping point” for action on rising healthcare costs, compared with only 70% of HR leaders, a May 2026 survey from professional services firm Aon found.

Part of the issue is simple. HR and finance are coming at the problem from different angles. “Where HR looks at employee well-being, employee retention and inclusion, a CFO likely sees healthcare costs as a line item that’s growing faster than revenue,” the survey’s authors wrote.

And for that reason, solving the healthcare cost dilemma vexing so many organizations right now, experts said, is going to require more collaboration between HR and finance.

“What I’ve seen employers do really well in this environment is break [the] silos [between HR and finance] down because there [are] actually more opportunities between the two of them than they maybe even realize,” Mike Pasterick, health solutions practice leader for Aon North America, told CFO Brew.

All in the timing. Right now, the disconnect happens in large part because of communication cadence and timing, according to experts. For example, CFOs may be too often joining the healthcare costs conversation once it’s already been had, forcing them to make tougher decisions than if they’d been looped in much earlier.

CFOs are “being given the increase and saying, ‘What do we do with this? How do we spread it out? Do we pass it on to employees? Do we budget for it? Do we move it from another financial bucket in the P&L or the line item on a reactionary basis?’” Simon Camaj, US health leader at professional services firm Marsh, told us.

Naturally, “CFOs are going to say, ‘I was surprised. You put me in a tough spot. Now I have to have a conversation with the CEO potentially, because they’re balance sheet items,’” he explained.

Instead, Camaj recommends a more hands-on approach: Meet with HR early and often. “The natural calendar gets us in trouble,” he said. “There should be an evergreen evaluation of the data, the utilization.”

“By the time it comes to the CFO, it’s like we have two levers to pull, and we have to do it within X amount of [time] for the next year,” Camaj said. “How do we get to that place where your hand [is] on the lever throughout the year?”

After all, that’s what CFOs do best, he added. “They’re perpetually forecasting how the business is working with all the puts and takes. Healthcare now has become a put and take into their P&L.”

Joint interests. In addition to simply upping the frequency of communication and evaluation, both parties need to focus on translating their objectives for each other.

“Organizations that are investing this much in healthcare and well-being are doing it because they care about the health of their workforce,” Ellen Kelsay, president and CEO of Business Group on Health, told us. That’s an HR issue, but also a financial one: “For many employers, [healthcare spend] directly impacts productivity and engagement,” she explained. “Those things impact business performance and business outcomes.”

“Really connecting those dots, both for finance and the HR people alike, makes for the most productive conversations, when they can have macro-level business-related conversations and take it out of just the HR benefit line item in a budget, but really understand the magnitude overall,” Kelsay noted.

Camaj added: “It just can’t be: ‘Here’s what happened. Here’s what we set [on a] reactionary basis.’ There has to be modular messaging where there’s definitely an owner at the front line, but then there has to be a message on how things are working.”

“The finance and the HR teams that work really well together end up with better results,” Pasterick said. “They understand the people impact, how to attract and retain the best talent,” how the subsidy approach or the richness of benefits compares with the rest of the market, and what kinds of people the organization is trying to attract, he explained. “It’s really critical to break down that silo, in my estimation, because that leads to the most efficient outcomes.”