Mercer is offering health care spending junkies a sneak previewat data still in the development stage. The news looks good —employers are again reporting that they’re improving theircontainment of health care costs as acorporate line item.

Here are the highlights from this large-scale survey of U.S.corporations:

• After plan design alterations, employers say they expect anaverage cost increase of 4.2 percent;

• This marks the fifth straight year employers have kept costincreases under an informal target of 5 percent;

• Consensus is building around the use of consumer-directed plansremain to avoid paying the so-called Cadillac tax.

The news about the cost estimate is especially buoying becausethe actual 2014 increase as reported by employers was slightly lessthan 4 percent.

And there’s more good news: Employers reported that, if theymade no design changes, the increase would be about 6.4 percent —down from 7.1 percent for 2015 “and ... the lowest rate ofunderlying cost growth seen since Mercer began collecting thisinformation in 2005.”