I ran across an interesting proposal that one of the reasons for poor wage growth is health insurance costs -
Health Care and Other Benefit Costs
As nonwage benefits are beefed up by U.S. employers, such as expanded paid leave and performance-based bonuses, fewer dollars in their total rewards budgets may be available for salary increases.
But health care benefit costs are a prime suspect.
"The rise of health-care costs is the most important reason wages have not increased more for U.S. workers," Nobel economics laureate Edward C. Prescott and Lee E. Ohanian of the Center for the Advanced Study in Economic Efficiency at Arizona State University, wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2018. "The extra compensation is swallowed up by health-insurance premiums."
A new white paper provides evidence that "the rising values of fringe benefits, such as health insurance, may have offset potential wage gains for middle-income workers" despite falling unemployment. The authors, Jeff Larrimore of the Federal Reserve and David Splinter of the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, contend that when factoring in the cost of health coverage, "total compensation may be higher than previously believed, also implying that employer-sponsored health insurance benefits may represent a larger share of employee compensation."
Economics columnist Robert J. Samuelson wrote in the Washington Post:
The problem is plain: We'd all like both cheaper health insurance and higher wages, but the way the health-care system is operating today, we might get neither. As insurance premiums get more expensive, inflation-adjusted ("real") wages will continue to stagnate or decline.
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensatio...