Health Care benefits may be changing. . . what about yours?

September 22, 2026/Business/

I don’t think it will happen overnight, but if you operate a funeral home or if you are an employee of a funeral home I think the time to be watching for possible employee health care benefit changes is near.

I got up on Sunday morning and looked over my daily inbox news before heading out to church. This short video interview, that includes a written transcript, with health care company executive Mark Bertolini grabbed my attention. I watched for only a few seconds, the video only totals about 2:30 minutes, before he pointed out the history of employer health benefits which came from added benefits for employees during government imposed wage restrictions following World War II.

It dawned on me that was 80 years ago and we still operate under the same type of system. Bertolini, CEO of public company Oscar Health then made this comment on what he hears from many of the U.S.’s major employers, “We can no longer make that work”.

He also made a comment that a major company, Disney, has made changes to its employee benefits packages for this upcoming (2027) year somewhat pointing that situation out.

Here’s an article from Yahoo Finance on that subject titled “Spouses of Disney employees losing health care coverage after company’s policy change.“

Here’s another article on the subject from Becker’s Payers Issues titled “From Disney to Starbucks, big employers are pulling every lever to contain health health costs”.

Bertolini predicts that we may not be too far off from a change in employers’ stances much like the 1980’s changes from defined pensions to individual IRA, profit-sharing, or 401k contributions to individual accounts that shifted choice and future benefits from the employer to the employee.

He predicts that those types of accounts will be coming where an employer will give a set amount of money to each employee and then it will be up to the employee to purchase their own health care that best suits them. Bertolini comments that 72% of “large” employers are already thinking this way.

Here is some information on the Funeral Home profession from Mployer Advisor that gives information on what they call “Funeral Home Industry – Employee Benefits Summary”. I could not find a date for the article, but did notice the page is copyrighted in 2026, so my guess is that these are current statistics.

If it is current some of the information is surprising to me. The article notes that “Only 49% of funeral home employers offer their employees access to medical insurance. This is well under the national average of 69%.”

Here is an archived article from three years ago by Funeral Director Daily titled “Health care cost may drive increased expenses in 2024″.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take: Change is always difficult and sometimes downright scary. However, it is pretty evident that continual rising health care inflation coupled with increased useage of health care and the different streams of health care revenue depending on one’s situation with job status, age, or inability to pay will at some point reach a breaking point.

Moving from defined benefit pensions to individually cared for IRAs, 401k’s, and profit sharing accounts with a federal floor level of support for those who made bad decisions, or never worked to gain these benefits seems to have worked out pretty well over the past 40-some years.

My guess is that we will hear rumblings of more health care related changes once the election year is over. And, if done correctly, there will eventually be some kind of shift much like the shift from pensions to individual accounts happened in the 1980’s.

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