Health Care
Health care is manufacturers' top cost pressure - and team members' top concern. Manufacturers are leading with coverage and pressing for policies that make quality care more affordable.
Health Care
Health care is manufacturers’ top cost concern. The NAM has a prescription.
Manufacturers are deeply committed to the health of their workforce — employer-sponsored insurance is the bedrock of American coverage. But relentless cost increases threaten manufacturers’ ability to keep offering it, and hit small and medium-sized companies hardest. The NAM’s roadmap charts a practical path to lower costs without sacrificing care or innovation.
Sources: NAM Q1 2026 and Q4 2025 Manufacturers’ Outlook Surveys; KFF 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey. Small (75%) and medium (78%) manufacturers feel the cost burden most.
The roadmap
Manufacturers’ roadmap to lower health care costs
A practical, twelve-point agenda — distilled here into six priorities — to bring down costs for manufacturing workers and all Americans while protecting access and innovation.
Rein In PBMs
Pharmacy benefit managers are underregulated middlemen that drive up drug costs. Building on new transparency and 100% rebate pass-through, the NAM is fighting to delink PBM pay from drug list prices.
Restore the 340B Program
Return the program to its original purpose — helping low-income and underserved patients — rather than padding hospital profits at the expense of employer-sponsored coverage.
Expand Affordable Options
More flexible, lower-cost coverage: larger Health Savings Accounts, Association Health Plans codified under ERISA, broader ICHRA adoption and expanded access to telehealth.
Protect Access to Innovation
Reject most-favored-nation and other price controls that choke off R&D — and keep life-saving, cost-saving medicines accessible and affordable for workers and their families.
Preserve IP & a Strong FDA
Defend the intellectual property — and the Bayh-Dole framework — that turns research into cures, and fully resource an FDA committed to gold-standard, evidence-based science.
Defend the Foundation
Protect ERISA’s federal preemption and the employer-sponsored insurance tax exclusion — the legal and financial bedrock of manufacturers’ ability to offer benefits nationwide.
Momentum
Reform is already taking hold
Manufacturers’ advocacy has already begun to deliver lower costs and more transparency — with more to come.
“These reforms are an important step toward delivering long-overdue transparency and accountability for the underregulated middlemen who drive up costs at the pharmacy counter.” — Jay Timmons, NAM President & CEO, on PBM reform
Source: NAM, Prescription for a Healthy Workforce: Manufacturers’ Roadmap to Lower Health Care Costs (2026).
Employer-Sponsored Coverage
Manufacturers lead every industry in offering health coverage
Employer-sponsored insurance is how manufacturing families get their care — and manufacturers offer it at the highest rate of any sector. Even as premiums climb, manufacturers keep finding flexible ways to deliver coverage: adjusting plan designs, expanding options and pressing for policies that make good benefits affordable to provide.
Providing health coverage is how manufacturers compete for talent and keep a healthy, stable workforce — which is why lowering the cost of offering it sits at the center of the NAM’s health care agenda.
Read: Shaping Up Health CareSources: Kaiser Family Foundation Employer Health Benefits Survey; NAM Manufacturers’ Outlook Survey.
Lower costs, healthier workers
Manufacturers can’t keep absorbing unsustainable health care costs. Help the NAM advance a practical roadmap that protects coverage, care and innovation.
