A salaried job with health benefits has long been considered the gold standard of employment in the US. But now, as sharply rising health care premiums eat into workers\u2019 pay, young, healthy professionals are rejecting employer-sponsored insurance. Instead, they\u2019re going without coverage or finding cheaper options, saying they can\u2019t afford to be on the company plan.<\/p>\n
Jessica Balcerzak, a 33-year-old nurse who works for a hospital in Buffalo, New York, decided to waive her employer\u2019s insurance in 2025. Her job covered 55 percent of the plan\u2019s premiums, deducting $585 every two weeks for insurance for herself, her self-employed husband, and their three kids. Balcerzak said that $15,000 in annual wages would be better used in the family\u2019s high yield savings account or paying down debt.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was spending so much money and we don\u2019t even use this because we\u2019re healthy,\u201d said Balcerzak. Instead, she opted to join medical cost-sharing cooperative Zion HealthShare with her husband for $297 each month. Such groups help members pool money to cover each other\u2019s health care expenses. They don\u2019t have the same consumer protections requirements as traditional health insurance and don\u2019t guarantee coverage of claims. She signed the kids up for New York State\u2019s Child Health Plus plan, which provides low-cost coverage for children without other insurance. In all, she\u2019s paying $970 less per month than she would have on her company plan.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m literally a nurse,\u201d Balcerzak added. \u201cI wish we were given some benefit from the health care that we do have to work for.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most Americans get medical insurance from their employers, with the average worker paying 26 percent of the total premium for family coverage. Companies cover the rest.<\/p>\n
With premiums rising 6 percent in 2025 for company family plans alongside the growing cost of living, some workers are questioning whether their benefits are worth the cost. The share of workers covered by their firms\u2019 benefits has remained relatively stable for the past twenty years, but has fallen to 61 percent, down from 64 percent in 2020, according to surveys of employers by KFF, the health policy research firm.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt really is this perfect storm right now where everything has increased and people that normally would have just re-enrolled are starting to look at every single dollar they\u2019re paying for their daily life, including their health insurance,\u201d said Myranda Cleary, a Kansas City-based insurance consultant.<\/p>\n
Forgoing major medical insurance is not without risks, however. The plan that Balcerzak joined allows members to \u201cshare,\u201d or be reimbursed for costs over $5,000, though she has not yet needed to file a claim. But a 2023 study on health insurance alternatives conducted by the Government Accountability Office found that share plans can restrict coverage for pre-existing conditions and mental health services.<\/p>\n
The workers leaving corporate plans tend to be young and healthy. Employers rely on those workers to pay premiums and file few claims to keep plans sustainable for insurance carriers. Human resources executives say that because insurers negotiate premiums based on previous claims, a substantial exodus could result in higher costs for other employees.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery single person that opts out creates this lopsided situation where they cannot sustain the costs and at some point it breaks,\u201d Cleary said.<\/p>\n
It is a trend employers should be watching as they begin the renewal process with insurers ahead of the conventional open enrollment period in the fall, said Tawanda Johnson, a human resources chief for several venture capital and private equity startups. She formerly served as senior vice president of people at The Knot.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s strength in numbers,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cWhen it\u2019s a larger group, you have more bargaining power with the insurance companies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both employers and employees are looking for ways to manage stark increases in health care costs in recent years. Medical care premiums comprised 7.7 percent of total compensation for US workers in March 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those costs to employers are set to rise even further. Benefits consultant Mercer forecasts that the total cost of health plans per employee will grow at the highest rate in more than a decade in 2026 at 6.5 percent. About half of large employers said that the increases are pushing them to raise deductibles or exclude pricey treatments such as GLP-1 drugs for weight loss.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving health care benefits you can\u2019t afford is like unlimited vacation, it\u2019s a false promise,\u201d said the chairperson of Carnegie Mellon University\u2019s Health Care Policy and Management program Denise Rousseau. She said that redesigning policies to force employees to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket before their insurance coverage kicks in shifts the financial risk for health crises onto employees and could prompt some to leave.<\/p>\n
Insurance brokers and consultants including Cleary said that while they once primarily sold plans to self-employed workers, they have been overwhelmed with calls from corporate employees seeking other options. Others are working with employers to find ways to win workers back.<\/p>\n
Tommy Gaffney, vice president of employee benefits consultancy Evolved Benefits, said he is working with clients to introduce plans with limited coverage that emphasize low-cost preventative care. As many as 40 percent of workers at Gaffney\u2019s clients waived major medical benefits due to cost last year, especially at firms with large blue-collar or front-line workforces.<\/p>\n
After a \u201cdisastrous\u201d year with an unusually high number of medical claims, New York communications firm KCSA faced doubled premiums for its 63 employees even after the firm shared some of the cost, said chief human resources officer Katie Roland.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople were screaming,\u201d Roland said. Workers explored plans on the open marketplace and pushed Roland to consider switching carriers for the company\u2019s group, before she resorted to doing individual consultations to help workers find affordable policies.<\/p>\n
In the end, most employees stayed on the plan, and she worked to offer the strongest coverage for the most-used benefits. \u201cWe are finding that medical insurance is more important to people than salaries,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
When his wife, Paige, started a new job in March, Daniel Wilson, 40, pushed her to prioritize flexibility over employee benefits. Paige, also 40, ultimately accepted an offer from a Detroit startup that would allow her to work remotely and covered 70 percent of its health plan\u2019s annual premium for their family of 5. The plan was expensive and had a high deductible, so they wondered if they would be better off without it.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor my family, it\u2019s a $40,000 question,\u201d Wilson said. They joined a health share cooperative $550 each month and waived the employer plan.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur decision is driven by economics, and it\u2019s just not a good deal.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A salaried job with health benefits has long been considered the gold standard of employment in the US.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":614818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253],"class_list":["post-614817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}