They do get rewarded?

That money has to come from somewhere, so a cheaper pick means more money available for other things like nicer employee lounges, free drinks, etc…

I'm sorry to inform you that the money does not go to those things, but rather to reward the person who made a poor choice for everyone, and also to retained earnings.

Unless you were being sarcastic in saying "yeah you're going to die sooner due to our poor healthcare choice, but hey, a free soda*!"

* remote workers get nothing

Where do you think perks, facilities, etc., offered in a modern workplace in the US come from, if not via spending money somewhere?

Why do you think perks get better when healthcare benefits get worse? Usually they both get worse at the same time due to the same cost-cutting incentives. We'd need some data showing that savings from choosing terrible healthcare plans get redirected towards improving perks in an equal-or-more-valuable way (including for remote folks) in order to justify the former with the latter.

Besides that, most companies can afford free soda with or without terrible healthcare choices, so it seems totally orthogonal: free soda doesn't require bad healthcare choices and bad healthcare choices don't imply free soda.

I never said there must be a direct genuine linkage?

It could of course be very delayed or simply be used primarily as pretexts for corporate infighting with a very low probability of such a linkage.

But nonetheless even in the worst case scenario, a very low probability for the median employee is still better than zero probability.

Without evidence that the savings were being directed towards a cause preferable to employees, I would conclude that there was insufficient convincing justification for choosing a bad healthcare plan other than that it provided extra incentives to the chooser, like money or favor.

'We could theoretically spend greater than 0% of the savings on something that could be better or worse sometime in the future' isn't good enough on its own, and it's not convincing enough that it will ever happen, and if it does, it doesn't leave me convinced that the money will be spent on something better for me.

> even in the worst case scenario, a very low probability for the median employee is still better than zero probability.

The criteria to use here is, "do employees feel they're better off with the new, terrible healthcare plan, given any free sodas etc they might have received in exchange". If the employees wouldn't have voluntarily made the same choice for themselves, then it was a bad healthcare choice for employees.