Weight-Loss Spending Leads Employers to Trim Health Benefits: Mercer
- Rising costs from weight-loss and specialty drugs are leading large employers to scale back healthcare benefits, according to a new Mercer survey covered by Reuters.
- The consultancy said 51% of large employers with more than 500 workers plan to increase cost-sharing in 2026, up from 45% for 2025.
- More than three-quarters of employers cite GLP-1 weight-loss drugs as a top cost concern.
- Employers are also considering alternatives to traditional pharmacy benefit managers, with 40% said to be considering alternative contracting models for their prescription medicine benefits.
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House Republicans Push for Probe of Federal WC Program
- Top Republicans on the House Education and Workforce Committee are seeking an investigation into the workers’ compensation program for federal employees, claiming the program is “susceptible to waste, fraud and abuse.”
- In a letter to the Government Accountability Office on Monday, Committee Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI) and Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA), chairman of the workforce protections subcommittee, requested a further examination into areas for reforms of the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA) program.
- Among the questions posed, the legislators said they want to know to what extent the Labor Department’s Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs follows leading practices for risk management and fraud.
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NC Court Sanctions FFVA Mutual on Denied Claim
- A North Carolina Appeals Court has sanctioned FFVA Mutual and its client after the insurer denied a claim and then sought to reinstate it in the face of a wrongful-death tort suit.
- The appeal by the client, furniture maker TCS Design, was found to be ‘not well-grounded in fact,’ is ‘not warranted by existing law or a good faith argument for the extension, modification, or reversal of existing law,’ and has been taken ‘to harass [and] cause unnecessary increase in the cost of litigation,’” the appellate judges wrote in their July 2 order, citing case law from previous court rulings.
- TCS and FFVA must now cover the cost of the appeal and pay the plaintiff’s attorney fees in the litigation stemming from a 2020 incident.
- In that incident, a TCS factory worker shot a colleague over a dispute over their loud singing.
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