Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Employer-based Health Insurance more than Doubles – Have wages doubled?

News just in from Rockville, MD.  The TriState Observer has reported the latest results from of a study concerning the woeful condition of our nation’s health insurance/care system. The study was conducted by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.  Posted on the Observer’s www.tristateobserver.com/ web site, the findings show some pretty significant and disparaging facts.  One of the most striking is over-100% increase (more than double) of the health insurance premium costs for both the private-sector employers and also their employees. This doubling of health insurance premium costs has taken place in the short space of only 10 years (from 1996 to 2006). These are the findings from AHRQ’s survey:

The overall statistics show that the total annual health insurance premium costs for the average employer-based family plan rose from $4,954 to $11,381 in ten years (certainly it’s higher than that now). This represents a 130% increase. For an individual plan, the annual health insurance premium costs jumped from $1,992 to $4,118, which represents a 107% increase.

Breaking those figures down further; the studies found that the cost that employers had to pay toward the average family plan climbed from $3,679 to $8,491.  This is a 131% increase.  The increase the employers had to pay toward the average individual plan was from $1,650 to $3,330; a 102% rise.  For the average family plan the employee was responsible for the remainder, which jumped from $1,275 to $2,890. This represents a 127% increase. The figures for single employees was a surge in cost from $342 to $788. That would be a 130% increase. As you can see, the employers took the brunt the health insurance expense increase ($4812 / family and $1688 / single) vs. ($1615 / family and $466 / single) for the employees.