Reducing healthcare spend: Small steps add up

You’ve got to start somewhere. And when it comes to healthcare spend, you really do need to do something.

The average cost of health benefits is expected to climb 6.7% in 2026, placing cost growth at a 15-year high, according to a national survey of employer-sponsored health plans from Mercer, a global professional services firm.

“The current elevated cost trend, which began in 2023 following a decade of growth averaging only about 3% annually, is putting mounting pressure on benefit budgets and, in some organizations, beginning to affect broader business operations,” the report noted.

And—trust—that’s been stressing CFOs out: A third of finance chiefs Mercer polled in February 2026 ranked healthcare costs as one of their top three opex concerns. Compare that with the 19% who ranked health benefit costs as a top three concern in 2024, and you get a sense of the growing problem.

Maybe, just maybe, you’re one of those stressed-out CFOs. Well, you’ve come to the right article.

Incremental. The first step is simply taking a step, according to Marybeth Gray, SVP of health and welfare consulting at MarshMcLennan Agency.

“Nobody eats an apple in one bite,” she told CFO Brew. “We have to take little bites of the apple to move forward. There’s probably 300 little things that I could throw at an employer to think about. It’s the little tiny things that add up to big cost reduction.”

In terms of baby steps, she recommends CFOs start with the data. “Each company is different; each company’s data is different, but you have to figure out what you’re solving for,” she explained. When she consults clients, for example, the first thing her team does is “an underwriting forensic analysis of what’s driving costs.”

Year to year. Once potential cost-drivers have been identified, Gray recommends keeping the baby steps mentality as your team thinks through solutions.

“You do the easiest things that yield the most cost savings the first year,” she said. “If it’s a disruptive strategy, like changing [pharmacy benefit managers] or insurance partners, that has to be a year two or year three strategy, with a runway for communications.”

Even for changes that seem slight, you’ll also want to ensure any proposed solutions are actually solving for the correct cost-drivers. “Make sure that you know what the savings is,” she cautioned. “You don’t want to make a change that saves you $20,000, but if you know the change is worth $250,000, then the juice might be worth the squeeze.”

And for any change you might make, you also have to look ahead. When Gray works with clients, they “build out a three-year plan for employers” considering the changes that might occur each year.

“We modify [the plan] every year, and we do a retrospective [ROI] analysis. We made this change last year; we predicted it would save this much. Did it? Did it work? Was there a modification that we needed to make to it?” she said. “We’re busy now, every week, of every month, of every year. Our job is not [to] come in at the end and negotiate the renewals.”

Translation: Start now. There’s no time like the present.