This comes out of recent personal experience as a employee, or rather, as the spouse of an employee with employer-sponsored healthcare, as well as regular training sessions at work. <\/p>\n
Open enrollment is coming around, and initial announcements are beginning \u2014 no actual pricetags, yet, but the statement that our company has had higher-than-average claims for the last several years, and that, once again, it\u2019s going to lead to a change in the cost-sharing. \u00a0That is, rather than continuing to pay, say, 80% of premiums, they\u2019re going to pass the \u201cexcess\u201d cost increase onto employees by now paying only 70%. \u00a0Of course, when we have a good year, with lower-than-average claims, you can bet they\u2019re not going to boost up the cost-share to 80% again.<\/p>\n
Those of you with employer-sponsored health insurance, think about what you pay for health insurance now, vs. a decade or two ago. \u00a0(I paid $10, in total, in copays when my oldest was born.) \u00a0Yes, part of it is that health insurance in general has gone up in cost; I\u2019m not discounting that \u2014 but the employer\u2019s share is also decreasing. \u00a0And this trend will accelerate. \u00a0Employers want out. \u00a0Sure, there are requirements in Obamacare, depending on how upcoming court decisions are decided, but there is still a lot of latitude for decreasing the cost-share, especially for dependents.<\/p>\n
And it used to be seen as important that employers offer generous healthcare benefits for employee retention. \u00a0Sure, my firm still offers studies to employers comparing their benefit programs to our database of participating employers, and I haven\u2019t been involved in this particular project for a good decade now, but my hunch is that employers are more willing to be below-average in healthcare subsidy if they can hit their \u201caverage\u201d target in other ways. \u00a0In any event, we also conduct surveys in which employers state that they are more concerned with controlling cost than with employee satisfaction over their healthcare benefits.<\/p>\n
After the financial accounting statement 106 was published in the early 90s requiring employers to account for future healthcare liabilities in the same way as pension liabilities, employers nearly-universally abandoned retiree healthcare benefits, except for grandfathered groups. \u00a0At least with pensions, pay increases were more or less predictable, and there were well-established funding mechanisms. \u00a0Not so for healthcare. <\/p>\n
One of the approaches many employers took was a \u201ccap\u201d \u2014 \u201cwe will contribute a subsidy amount which we will allow to grow to no more than 2 times our subsidy as of 1993,\u201d for instance. \u00a0And I expect that employers will apply this approach to employee healthcare, too.<\/p>\n
So what happens when, over time, employer contributions have dropped to new lows? \u00a0\u2014 especially since, if your employer-sponsored insurance is deemed \u201caffordable\u201d for the employee, the spouse and children aren\u2019t able to get subsidies or even go onto the exchange at all? \u00a0 In an ideal world, that\u2019s when we\u2019d start to see some real change, but there\u2019s still no reason to believe that providers, especially near-monopoly hospitals, won\u2019t still hold all the cards. \u00a0Maybe, maybe<\/i>\u00a0some competing insurer will offer new apps allowing you to find the lowest-cost way of getting those stitches in your kid\u2019s forehead (yeah, second time this year \u2014 but now we hit the deductible and are home free for the rest of the year), even if you have to drive longer distances. \u00a0But that\u2019s about it. \u00a0Other than that, I got nothing.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This comes out of recent personal experience as a employee, or rather, as the spouse of an employee with employer-sponsored healthcare, as well as regular training sessions at work. Open enrollment is coming around, and initial announcements are beginning \u2014 no actual pricetags, yet, but the statement that our company has had higher-than-average claims for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[194],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-employer-healthcare"],"yoast_head":"\n