They are monetarily and/or promotionally incentivized to pick a bad, cheaper option for employees. The other employees don't get rewarded for the decision.
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*!"
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.
Or are you implying the ‘pickers’ get special gold plated services completely different from regular employees?