"The most important people in saving health care and saving America is businesses," he said.

Klepper was vocal about the problems plaguing the country's health care system. Among the issues:

• "We pay double the amount all other countries are paying and we live right in the middle of the pack for quality of care," Klepper said. For example, he said, the average cost of an angiogram is $35 in Canada but $915 in the United States. A single tablet of the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor that is $6 in New Zealand costs $124 here.

• We waste too much on health care spending: According to a 2008 PwC statistics cited by Klepper, more than half of what Americans spend on health care is wasted and has no value.

• There's too much focus on specialists and not enough on primary care: that results in too much testing and too little face time with physicians to form relationships and figure out the best course of action.

"Fee for service is the crack cocaine of health care," Klepper said. "The reason no one in health care wants to address these issues is that they're making a lot of money on it."

"Everyone in health care, except primary care, is typically incentivized to want health care to cost more," he said. "If you were going to have a serious conversation with your C-suite, specifically your chief financial officer, they are the ones who if they understand how grave and serious it is, they will stand with you to get stand with you and try to stop it.

So where do businesses start? "The first thing to do is get your C-suite in the room and get them to firmly understand the situation is very serious and if you are going to be the best benefits manager you could be, you need their support," Klepper said.

Klepper told HR professionals that businesses should start small by embracing some specialty firms in the industry–the "pearls hidden among the manure in health care"–that are doing it right. One example he cited is Cologuard, a noninvasive colon cancer screening test that patients can use at home. Kleeper said the procedure costs about $550, instead of the $2,000-$2,500 a colonoscopy costs.

What employers could do, Klepper said, is to focus on smaller categories of health care that don't affect as many employees, such as oncology or muscular-skeletal, and watch as health care costs drop. "Then you can take that example to the C-suite, to others, and say 'The results are powerful. Let's do some more.'"

"We think your health care costs can be 60 percent lower than they are now," he said.