The 2027 Plan Changes Your Employees Can’t Read

Why the year employers are shifting more healthcare costs is also the year benefits communication has less margin for error.

Open enrollment is a communication problem disguised as an administrative one. Most years, that distinction doesn’t cost anybody much. Employees default into last year’s election; the plan is roughly the same, and nobody notices.

2027 is not shaping up to be most years.

The Setup for 2027 Open Enrollment

Three numbers, and they compound.

PwC’s annual medical cost projection puts the group medical cost trend at 9% for 2027 — the highest reading in 17 years. A combination of factors, including rising pharmacy costs and continued growth in behavioral health utilization, is contributing to that pressure.

Employers are responding. In Mercer’s survey of large U.S. employers, 48% of those with 500 or more employees expect to make changes to their medical plans for 2027 that will result in higher out-of-pocket costs for employees, such as higher deductibles or copays.

And the employee making that decision is not necessarily spending much time studying it. The Consumer Engagement in Health Care Survey found that half of enrollees spent less than an hour choosing their health plan during open enrollment.

So: a year of consequential plan changes, decided by people who may spend less than an hour reviewing their options. That’s a comprehension problem before language enters the picture at all.

Where Language Enters the Picture

According to 2024 U.S. Census Bureau data, approximately 74 million people age 5 and older in the United States speak a language other than English at home, and nearly 29 million speak English less than “very well.”

Those populations aren’t distributed evenly across industries, locations, or individual workforces. Employers in warehousing, food processing, hospitality, construction, home health, manufacturing, agriculture, and other industries may have significant portions of their frontline workforce reading benefits materials in a second language.

The failure here rarely looks like a complaint. It can look like:

• An employee defaults into last year’s election because the change notice didn’t register, then discovers the new deductible months later.
• An HSA-eligible employee never opens the account because the concept of an HSA doesn’t survive an unexplained acronym.
• A dependent gets dropped during the transition and nobody catches it until a claim is denied.
• A wave of first-quarter HR questions that trace back to a document sent during open enrollment.

None of that necessarily shows up as a language issue in your ticketing system. It may simply show up as “employees didn’t understand their benefits,” which is where many post-mortems stop.

A Note on the Regulatory Picture

Executive Order 14224, signed in March 2025, designated English as the official language of the United States and revoked Executive Order 13166, the 2000 directive addressing meaningful access for people with limited English proficiency. Subsequent Department of Justice guidance directed federal agencies to minimize non-essential multilingual services.

The change generated questions about what it means for organizations outside the federal government.

The executive order itself applies to federal agencies and does not eliminate other legal requirements that may apply to particular employers or organizations. For example, OSHA requires applicable employee training to be provided in a language and vocabulary workers can understand.

Other federal and state requirements may also apply depending on an organization’s activities, funding, workforce, and location. Covered entities subject to Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, for example, remain subject to language-access requirements, including requirements governing notices about the availability of language assistance services.

The regulatory landscape has changed, but organizations should not assume that every language-access obligation has disappeared as a result.

This article is not legal advice. Legal and compliance teams should determine the specific requirements that apply to their organizations. The practical question for HR and benefits teams is somewhat different: even where translation is not specifically required, what are the consequences when employees don’t understand information that directly affects their healthcare and financial decisions?

What Good Preparation Looks Like Heading Into Fall

Organizations don’t always need to translate every benefits document at once. Prioritizing the materials that directly shape employee decisions can be a practical place to start.

Know your actual language mix, not your assumed one. Most HR teams can name their most common language and may have a sense of the second. Existing workforce and onboarding data can provide a clearer picture, particularly for multi-site employers where language needs may differ significantly by location.

Prioritize by consequence, not by volume. The document that changes an employee’s financial outcome for the year — a change notice, plan comparison, or enrollment deadline — may require more immediate attention than a lengthy reference document. Identify the materials employees need to make informed enrollment decisions first.

Build the glossary once. Deductible, coinsurance, HSA, formulary, out-of-pocket maximum. Benefits terminology can be difficult to communicate clearly across languages, particularly when there is no simple one-to-one equivalent. Establishing approved terminology creates consistency from one document and enrollment cycle to the next.

Decide how you’ll handle live conversations before you need an interpreter. Enrollment meetings, one-on-one questions, and calls to HR are conversations, not documents. Whether those interactions are supported through over-the-phone interpreting, video, or an on-site interpreter is a decision worth making before enrollment begins rather than in the middle of a meeting.

Don’t make a bilingual employee your default interpreter. A colleague who speaks another language may be eager to help, but benefits terminology can be complex, and interpreting may fall well outside that employee’s role or training. Establishing access to professional interpreting services gives HR teams and employees a consistent resource when questions arise.

Plan for capacity before enrollment begins. Open-enrollment work tends to arrive within a relatively short window. Identifying translation needs and preparing materials earlier gives teams more time for translation, review, revisions, and formatting without turning routine work into rush work.

Why Timing Matters

For organizations preparing for 2027 open enrollment, the useful window is now. Conversations with brokers, carriers, payroll, and HR partners may already be underway. Language decisions belong in those same conversations rather than being added at the end.

A translated document that arrives two days before enrollment opens leaves little time for review, distribution, or employee questions.

With significant healthcare cost pressures and plan changes expected for 2027, employees need to understand what is changing while they still have time to make informed decisions.

The Language Center provides translation and interpreting services in more than 200 languages for HR, benefits, and employee communications, including enrollment materials, plan summaries, handbooks, onboarding materials, and interpreting support for employee meetings and other workplace conversations.

This article is provided for general information and does not constitute legal advice.