For decades, a salaried position with employer-sponsored health insurance was considered the “gold standard” of American employment. But a growing number of young, healthy professionals are now walking away from company plans, according to a report by Bloomberg, opting instead for cheaper alternatives or going without coverage entirely as rising premiums eat into their take-home pay.
The shift is driven by a “perfect storm” of high inflation and sharply rising medical costs that have made traditional benefits feel like a “false promise,” experts say.
Jessica Balcerzak, a 33-year-old nurse in Buffalo, New York, is among those who have made the jump. In 2025, she waived her hospital employer’s insurance after calculating that the plan, which covered 55 percent of premiums, was still deducting $585 every two weeks from her paycheck for her family. Balcerzak realized she was paying $15,000 annually for insurance her healthy family rarely used.
“I’m literally a nurse,” Balcerzak told Bloomberg. “I wish we were given some benefit from the health care that we do have to work for.”
Instead of the corporate plan, Balcerzak and her husband joined a healthshare, a medical cost-sharing cooperative, for $297 a month. She enrolled her children in New York State’s Child Health Plus plan, a low-cost option for kids without other insurance. The result was a monthly saving of $970 compared to her previous employer-sponsored coverage.
Healthshare programs, such as WeShare by UHSM, have long touted the benefits of affordable care that is appropriate for each member or family’s situation.
A Lopsided System
The trend of healthy workers exiting the pool poses a significant threat to the stability of employer-sponsored insurance, which covers the majority of Americans. According to surveys by KFF, a health policy research firm, the share of workers covered by firm benefits has dropped to 61 percent, down from 64 percent in 2020.
Insurance consultants warn that this exodus of low-risk individuals creates a “lopsided situation.” Employers rely on young, healthy workers to pay into the premium pool while filing few claims, which subsidizes the costs for older or chronically ill employees.
“Every single person that opts out creates this lopsided situation where they cannot sustain the costs and at some point it breaks,” Myranda Cleary, a Kansas City-based insurance consultant, told Bloomberg.
The financial pressure is expected to intensify. While family plan premiums rose 6 percent in 2025, benefits consultant Mercer forecasts that the total cost of health plans per employee will grow by 6.5 percent in 2026—the highest rate in more than a decade.
As traditional insurance becomes less affordable, workers are increasingly turning to medical cost-sharing groups, where members pool money to cover one another’s expenses. However, these alternatives come with substantial caveats.
A 2023 study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that these “share” plans often restrict coverage for mental health services and pre-existing conditions. Unlike traditional insurance, these cooperatives are not required to meet the same consumer protection standards and do not guarantee that claims will be covered.
“Having health care benefits you can’t afford is like unlimited vacation; it’s a false promise,” said Denise Rousseau, chairperson of Carnegie Mellon University’s Health Care Policy and Management program. She noted that high-deductible plans, which require employees to pay thousands out of pocket before coverage begins, shift financial risk for health crises directly onto the workers.
Some companies are already feeling the impact of a “disastrous” year of claims. KCSA, a New York communications firm with 63 employees, saw its premiums double after a year of high medical usage, according to chief human resources officer Katie Roland.
The increase prompted a backlash from staff, some of whom explored the open marketplace for individual policies. While most eventually stayed on the company plan after Roland conducted individual consultations, the incident highlighted a shift in priorities.
“We are finding that medical insurance is more important to people than salaries,” Roland told the Boston Globe.
Other employers are working with consultants like Tommy Gaffney of Evolved Benefits to introduce limited-coverage plans that focus on low-cost preventative care. Gaffney noted that at some of his client firms, particularly those with front-line or blue-collar workforces, as many as 40 percent of workers waived major medical benefits last year due to cost.
The “Economics” of Health
For families like the Wilsons in Detroit, the decision to leave corporate insurance was purely financial. When Paige Wilson, 40, took a new job at a startup, she and her husband Daniel looked at the high-deductible plan that would have covered their family of five.
Despite the employer covering 70 percent of the premium, the Wilsons felt the remaining costs were too high. They chose a health-share cooperative for $550 a month instead.
“For my family, it’s a $40,000 question,” Daniel Wilson told the Boston Globe. “Our decision is driven by economics, and it’s just not a good deal.”
HR executives like Tawanda Johnson say companies must watch these trends closely. “There’s strength in numbers,” Johnson said, noting that a larger group provides more bargaining power with insurers. Without the participation of the healthy, that bargaining power—and the traditional insurance model itself—may continue to erode.