The Strategic Levers of Cost Containment: Understanding Your Options

The Medical/Rx market is facing trend factors that are reaching a 30-year high. Unfortunately, we expect these higher trend factors to continue.

One of the most common concerns we hear from the marketplace is: “How can we continue to offer competitive benefits and maintain expectations around corporate cost structures?”

Questions like these will always arise, so it is imperative to have a clear strategy for what you are trying to solve. Are you addressing short-term cost shifting or aiming for long-term platform changes? Either way, you and your broker partner should approach these decisions with a multi-year strategy.

Cost shifting/sharing typically result in either higher premiums or higher out of pocket costs for employees, or both. If you are willing to look outside the typical renewal discussions around plan design and contribution changes, there are a multitude of cost containment and plan optimizing solutions available that can help employers contain costs, often without compromising the comprehensiveness of the plan offerings and employee satisfaction. It comes down to fit, which strategy is right for your organization.

While each of these strategies comes with their own complexities when it comes to implementation, they also bring varied levels of potential savings.

Cost Containment graphic created by AssuredPartners, 2025. 

Exploring Your Options

We have included over 20 benefits levers than can deliver savings to employers by engaging innovative solutions and platforms. We’ve sorted the list by both category and the potential savings typically assigned to successfully implemented programs. We evaluated opportunities within core plan structure, network design, member facing and add-on programs, pharmacy management, admin and financial levers and more.Many of these solutions are unique in that they require platform changes, data analysis, modeling or often enhanced education at implementation. Knowing you can’t market and implement all of these solutions in one year - building a strategy around your review and putting a multi-year plan together to execute on, can provide a guide that best fits your organization.

What’s Next

We don’t anticipate the need to control costs will ever go away. Therefore, this isn’t a race. Take your time and model out a plan. Plan design and contribution changes can typically apply to most platforms. They are the low hanging fruit.

Our advice, start broad with platform considerations first, and then work your way through what may or may not fit that platform. That will narrow down the list of potential options and will make it easier to focus on applicable solutions.