Health Care Costs Continue to Climb
A new survey from Mercer Consulting provides hard facts to back up what most of us already know. Health care costs are continuing to climb. According to Mercer’s survey of employer sponsored health plans, total US health care costs rose 6.1% last year, reaching about $ 7,983 per worker per year. The primary good news in this year’s survey is that the rate of cost increase has held steady for three years. In 2002, health care costs jumped a staggering fifteen percent. Employers project expect future cost increases of about 5.7% in 2008. How are firms responding to these cost pressures? Health management efforts, such as wellness programs, are the primary approach, now used by 80% of surveyed firms. Another strategy (used by 52% of those surveyed) expands the use of consumer-driven plans such as Health Savings Accounts. Both of these strategies do generate cost savings, but these savings are not keeping pace with overall inflation in health care costs.
View a summary of the 2007 Mercer National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans. The full survey is available for purchase.
Small Business and the Health Care Crunch
The Mercer Consulting survey cited above examines health care trends in large firms; a new National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) survey examines how small companies are faring. The short answer is “not very well.” The survey finds that, due to high costs, fifty-two percent of small employers do not offer health insurance or an insurance purchase subsidy. Forty-seven percent of small employers do offer such benefits, with 36% providing benefits to all or most full-time employees. In terms of costs, small employers tend to spend around 7.5% of payroll on employee benefits.
Download the 2007 National Federation of Independent Business National Small Business Poll (Volume 7, Number 3) on “Purchasing Health Insurance.”
Both stories: © 2007 The Public Forum Institute and the National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship with a link to www.publicforuminstitute.org/nde.
No comments:
Post a Comment