Help Clients Turn Health Benefits Into a Talent Attraction Tool

• By: oliviaoverman
• June 29, 2026

In 2025, 31% of employers made changes to enhance medical benefits to aid in talent attraction and retention, while 12% focused on improving pharmacy benefits, according to the “2025 Workforce Trends Benefits Report Series” by Gallagher. Employees, for their part, are increasingly seeking more affordable benefits packages, and companies that offer competitive health insurance benefits can stand out in the hiring process.

As healthcare costs continue to rise and economic uncertainty persists, employers are adjusting strategies to make their health benefit packages more attractive to current and prospective employees by offering improved health benefits and more tailored options.

For employers, making changes to health benefit packages is no easy feat. As trusted advisors, agents can help bridge the gap between carriers and consumers, helping ensure employers continue to offer not only access to affordable healthcare but also ease of administration.  

“Once plans are running in a more cost-effective fashion, those savings trickle down to the plan members,” says Ron E. Peck, chief legal officer, The Phia Group. “Contributions or premiums can level out or even decrease.” 

Options such as high-deductible plans and health savings accounts are avenues that employers are offering employees.

“When health consumers increasingly retain more of their own risk via tools like health savings accounts, they become better consumers of their own healthcare,” says Clay Dean, CEO of First Mid Insurance Group. “By working closely with a claims specialist at the broker level, employees get more information on costs for certain services or drugs, and ways to economize while getting the same or sometimes even better care.”

Additionally, “wellness programs and ancillary benefits are fairly common and commoditized, but educating team members about how to be better consumers of their own care is viewed by most as a real benefit,” Dean says. “When you leverage that with a health savings account (HSA), you end up with families who make money each year by being better healthcare consumers, and that is a tremendous benefit that employers and brokers can provide employees.”

Nevertheless, many employers are starting to see that HSA accounts might not be the best fit for their lowest-paid employees if they can’t afford to use them, according to the Gallagher report. As a result, many employers are looking into new benefit plans that incentivize employees to choose high-quality providers and help them navigate the healthcare system, the report said.

“Any time you have people spending a lot of time and money on something as important as their health, they will look for advice,” Dean says. “They want human expertise, advice and most of all a human touch that artificial intelligence (AI) cannot provide.”

For agents looking to add value to their healthcare clients, they can strengthen that relationship, ensuring customers have the insurance protection they need at a price that is right for them. Here are three considerations for agents:

1) Continue being empathetic. “Brokers should be empathetic as consumers themselves and spend more time trying to understand the emotional components of healthcare and health insurance,” Dean says.

 2) Break the mold. “Don’t assume that how things have been done are how things should be done moving forward,” Peck says. “Reconsider funding mechanisms, network arrangements and cost shifting strategies.”

“Unfortunately, like most things, we see costs rising and the only way to manage that is through innovative approaches,” Dean says. “Since brokers have seen many different ways to get after these problems, they are uniquely situated to advise clients on their many options.”

3) Continue to simplify. “Help simplify healthcare and health benefits in a way that eliminates the fear that accompanies this topic,” Peck says. “Change the narrative that it’s ‘too complicated to fix,’ and spark confidence that, as with any other consumer good, things can be done to get more for less, if people are willing to be creative and innovative.” 

Olivia Overman is IA content editor.