More Bad News for American Patients
Earlier this week consultants at Towers Watson, in conjunction with the National Business Group on Health, released their annual survey of large employers offering health insurance. And the results are not encouraging for businesses or employees:
Higher Costs: “Employers anticipate total health care costs will reach $11,664 per active employee in 2012, up from $10,982 in 2011 — a 6.2% increase in total costs over the period.”
Higher Premiums: “Employees, on average, paid 23.0% of total premium costs in 2011 and are expected to pay 23.7% in 2012, as companies take steps to control their costs. In paycheck deductions, this translated into an average employee contribution of $2,529 to premiums in 2011, which is expected to rise to $2,764 in 2012 — a 9.3% increase in one year.”
Higher Out-of-Pocket Charges: “The share of total health care expenses paid by employees, including premium and out-of-pocket costs, is expected to be 34.4% in 2012, up from 33.2% in 2011.”
Employers Dropping Retiree Coverage: “If [Obamacare] works as intended, the health insurance market in 2014 and beyond will become an attractive alternative and further push companies to exit sponsorship of their pre-65 programs.”
Employers Dropping Workers’ Coverage: “Nearly one in five companies is likely to offer health care coverage to a subset of its workforce and direct the remainder of its employees to the insurance Exchanges.”
Employers Less Confident about Offering Coverage: “Against the backdrop of [Obamacare], companies have never been more uncertain about the future of their health care programs over the long term….With the health care marketplace changing rapidly and parts of [Obamacare] already starting to take effect, employer confidence is at its lowest point (23%) since we began tracking this data.”
Businesses Bogged Down by Paperwork: Nearly one in six firms (15%) cited the cost of Obamacare compliance as one of the “biggest challenges to maintaining affordable benefit coverage.”
Firms Reducing Employee Hours: “Nearly 40% of companies that traditionally use a high number of part-time workers expect to limit them to less than 30 hours per week by 2014 to escape having to pay benefits.”
The report once again illustrates Obamacare’s broken promises – instead of premiums going down by $2,500, they continue to skyrocket, even as individuals are unable to maintain their prior coverage. It’s yet another example of the way in which Obamacare has failed to deliver for the American people.