Why Rising Healthcare Costs Are Still the #1 Problem in 2025
Every year, a new benefits survey confirms the same thing we’ve all known for a decade:
Costs are going up, and employers are tired of it.
The 2025 Lockton National Benefits Survey just made it official again:
The majority of plan sponsors say rising costs are their top challenge.
No surprise there.
But the more important question isn’t how much costs are rising—it’s why.
And here’s the hard truth:
The problem isn’t that care is expensive. The problem is that pricing is opaque, inflated, and disconnected from value.
You’re Not Getting a Deal—You’re Getting Played
Most employers still think they’re managing healthcare costs because they negotiated a “discount” off billed charges.
Let’s break that down.
- A hospital bills $10,000 for a procedure.
- Your plan gets a 40% discount.
- You pay $6,000 and feel like you got a deal.
But that $10,000 was never real to begin with. It’s a fake sticker price. A number made up to anchor the negotiation.
And the 40% discount? That’s just a sleight of hand to make you feel like someone fought for you.
Meanwhile, another provider across town might do the exact same procedure—for $1,500. Total.
That’s the game: you’re not buying healthcare. You’re buying billing codes at mystery prices.
The Real Issue: Lack of Transparency and Overpayment
We see this again and again:
- Employers don’t know the true price of care until after it’s delivered.
- Plan sponsors are “managing” costs based on discounts, not actual value.
- Employees get steered to high-cost systems with no context or alternatives.
That’s not cost management. That’s blindfolded buying.
It’s like trying to control your company’s P&L—but you don’t get to see vendor invoices until three months after you’ve paid them.
And when you finally do see the numbers, they’re marked up and unreadable.
So What’s the Alternative?
The goal isn’t to pay less for bad care. It’s to pay the right amount for the right care—on purpose.
That only happens when you have three things:
- Transparent pricing before care happens
- Aligned incentives that reward outcomes, not volume
- Plan design that supports better decisions instead of locking people into networks
We’ve helped companies do this without flipping their whole plan overnight. You can carve out high-cost areas, reroute common procedures, and audit how your dollars are actually being spent.
You don’t need to overhaul everything tomorrow. But you do need to stop assuming the system is fair just because it says you got a discount.
“But We’re Already Getting the Best Deal Available…”
Maybe. Maybe not.
If your renewal came with a spreadsheet that said, “Last year’s increase was 12%, but we negotiated it down to 8%,” that’s not savings. That’s noise.
If your network touts big discounts off billed charges, but you have no idea what the baseline is, that’s not strategy. That’s spin.
If your people are getting care from the highest-billing providers in your zip code just because they’re “in-network,” you’re not optimizing. You’re subsidizing the system.
Final Thought
It’s easy to blame healthcare costs for eating into margins. But the deeper issue is this: you’re being asked to write blank checks for unknown prices, to a system that rewards opacity.
Fixing that doesn’t start with better spreadsheets. It starts with better visibility.
You don’t need a discount off made-up numbers.
You need the truth—and a plan that respects it.
Want to know what you're actually paying—and what fair pricing could look like?
We can show you. No pressure. Just a side-by-side.