Every fall, benefits teams open the benchmark report and compare their employer contribution against a peer group matched by industry, size, and region. If the number lands near the median, the renewal moves forward. What nobody asks is whether that contribution buys care employees can actually afford to use.
U.S. healthcare spending reached $15,474 per person in 2024, roughly double what other developed nations pay. Premiums rose 6 percent in 2025 after back-to-back 7 percent increases. A benchmark tells you how your employer share compares with other companies. It says nothing about what happens when an employee walks into a clinic.
The benchmark stops at the premium line
Contribution benchmarking answers one question: what percentage of the health plan premium does the employer pay? That answer supports recruiting. It does not measure claims, out-of-pocket costs, or preventive care completion. The benchmark stops at the premium line. The employee experience starts after it.
About 1 in 3 Americans skip care or prescriptions because of cost. Medical bills factor into a large share of personal bankruptcies. Your plan can look competitive on employer share while employees still delay care because the deductible is too high.
The employer contribution is an input. The employee's financial position after using the plan is the output. Measuring the input and calling it a strategy misses the point.
The cost shift the benchmark hides
The employer share can hold still while employees quietly absorb more of the cost. In 2025, 72 percent of covered workers faced an out-of-pocket maximum above $3,000 for single coverage, and 21 percent faced one above $6,000. Workers also pay 16 percent of the single premium and 26 percent of the family premium on average. A plan that sits at the median on employer contribution still leaves employees facing out-of-pocket exposure in the thousands. None of that appears in a contribution benchmark, so a plan can rank well on paper and still fail the people who use it.
Benchmarking against a broken baseline
Peer benchmarks compare your contribution against plans that include the same middleman markups, opaque pricing, and misaligned incentives that pushed the benchmark up in the first place. Healthcare costs run high by design. Calibrating your plan to that baseline tells you where you stand inside a broken system. It cannot tell you what a better system would cost or return.
A different benchmark
WellthCare™ is the first Health-to-Wealth™ Benefit System. It doesn't replace the existing health plan. It works alongside it and gets used first.
Employees on a WellthCare Plan get three things:
- Reward dollars at the WellthCare Store™. Employees earn real, spendable reward dollars for verified preventive health actions. Those dollars work across more than 3,000 FSA-approved, health-supporting products, with no reimbursement paperwork.
- Automatic retirement contributions. Employers commit savings to retirement accounts, so preventive actions compound into visible wealth over time.
- $0-co-pay care used first. Employees access care before their primary plan, which means fewer deductibles, fewer bills, and less FSA/HSA drain.
For the employer, the question changes. Instead of asking what percentage of a premium you pay compared with peers, you ask what each contribution dollar returns in lower claims, completed preventive care, and retention.
The WellthCare Readiness Index™ answers that. After 6 to 12 months of real usage, the Index shows employers, with their own data, when and how much they would save by expanding. That is math, not marketing.
The WellthCare Plan is zero-net-cost for the employer. Employees pay their share through a Section 125 cafeteria plan, so the employer adds no new out-of-pocket line item. The benefit sits beside ACA-compliant employer coverage, never replacing it. A formal legal opinion supports the Program's structure. Compliance-grade recordkeeping tracks the preventive actions that trigger rewards.
The benchmark that matters
A better contribution benchmark has four columns:
- The employer's premium share.
- The employee's out-of-pocket exposure at the point of care.
- The preventive care completion rate inside the population.
- The retirement contribution funded by savings the employer commits.
Most employers only see the first column. Nationally, only about 8 percent of adults receive all of the high-priority preventive services recommended for them, so the column almost nobody tracks is often the one with the worst number.
One in five adults over 50 has no retirement savings. Most workers under 50 doubt Social Security will be there. A health plan that ignores preventive care and retirement leaves those numbers untouched. A benchmark that ignores them reports the wrong number as success.
The standard benchmark asks whether you pay enough to look competitive. The better benchmark asks whether your contribution makes employees healthier and wealthier. That second question is the one tied to lower claims. Issues caught early cost less to treat than issues caught late.
Better care. Lower claims. Higher retention.
See what a WellthCare Plan would look like for your team.
This article is for general information only and is not legal, tax, or medical advice. Employers should consult their own advisors.