May / June

While medical and pharmacy expenses continue to consume benefit budgets, employers can adopt effective cost-saving strategies that combine predictive analytics with innovative solutions to help control healthcare spend over a multi-year period.

The U.S. medical trend rate is forecast to rise 9.5 percent in 2025 — a seemingly unsustainable trend, but one that is predicted to persist for several years. As a result of these dynamics, employers must proactively manage healthcare budgets to prevent these costs from eating into other areas of total rewards and avoid passing more financial burden onto employees and their families.

In the opening months of 2025, economic forecasters are dealing with a serious bout of cognitive dissonance—we keep projecting steady growth and moderate inflation, even when faced with cascading risks to the outlook, which could easily lead to the opposite of “steady or moderate”. In fairness, those risks cut both ways: geopolitical and trade risks point to the downside, but still-healthy financial markets point to upside risk for growth this year. And note that this is fairly similar to the position of a year ago—fraught geopolitics, solid markets—and 2024 turned out to be characterized as steady growth in most major economies with moderate inflation. 

LinkedIn Live  |  May 22  |   11 – 11:30 a.m. CT 

Join us for our next CLA Outlook session as we go live on LinkedIn to delve into the complexity of tariffs and provide valuable insights for reducing their impact on your business. We’ll also address the most pressing questions from our recent three-part tariff mitigation webinar.

In early January, the incoming U.S. presidential administration loudly signaled that businesses should expect changes in trade policies in 2025. Although no specific policies had yet been promulgated, then President-elect Trump stated in social media outlets that broad sweeping import tariffs may be imposed on goods from Mexico, Canada and China. As of May 15, many new tariffs have been imposed, and then promptly deferred, rolled back and modified. As a result, experienced trade professionals generally have no clear understanding of the Trump administration’s trade policies objectives for global trade. Instead, it appears that tariffs will be used in horse trading to pursue a variety of federal government objectives. A review of the rollout of tariffs is instructive to businesses impacted by the tariffs.