Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Scaled-Back Health Insurance in Nevada, Pt.1 --  A new strategy.

Jennifer Robison of the Las Vegas REVIEW-JOURNAL has posted a very pertinent article divulging a precarious strategy shift in health insurance coverage. She states that, due to the ever-increasing trend of employers having to reduce, or even, drop health insurance coverage altogether, more and more people are finding themselves uninsured. Hardest hit are the small businesses, who are seeing double-digit rate increases. So some of the larger health insurance providers are ramping up schemes to cover the many in Nevada without health insurance. The new plans are written to offer those uninsured higher deductibles with matching HSAs. In this effort, they are lowering the cost of premiums, starting at $54 per month.

A California research nonprofit group called the Rand Corp conducted a study to assess these small business woes. What they found was that, between 2000 and 2005 the smallest businesses having 25 or less employees experienced a rate jump of almost 30%. Those small businesses in the middle, having between 25 and 49 employees, incurred a rate jump of 16% in employee health insurance costs. The larger small businesses having between 50 and 99 employees were hit hard with a 25% rate increase. Even though Rand’s researchers inferred that these hikes did not influence small businesses’ decisions to drop coverage at a rate any faster than larger businesses, a different report reflected a much sharper rate of them doing so. In another study by the University of Minnesota, it was shown that the over-all percentage of employee health insurance coverage in Nevada dropped from 59% down to 53% in 2005.

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