Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Heavy Health Costs, Pt3 -- Even for Insured

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Experts are in hopes that a runaway trend doesn’t set in where employers just start dropping health insurance plans altogether, but they do expect this weak economy could spark a push for “consumer-driven plans”. The difference is, typically, lower-cost premiums but higher deductibles. With around 6 million Americans currently enrolled in health insurance plans of this type, we are finding that the employee generally is responsible for a greater portion of the overall medical expense. Some good news is that many of these health insurance plans offer pretax shelters like HSAs (health-care savings accounts, untaxed and usable for medical purposes, some even for over-the-counter).

Not surprising to many, small business are in the biggest crunch. Because they lack the bargaining power of larger companies and have little clout with health insurance industry, they are left with only more costly or less quality choices for health insurance plans. Small businesses are being buried by these constraints.

A recent survey conducted by online payroll service, SurePayroll, indicates that most small businesses (about 56%) do not offer health insurance plans to employees. The most common reason given is that it would be too costly. Also revealed was that the number of small-business owners offering plans has decreased dramatically in the past 2 years. From the survey: “Thirty-two percent fewer small businesses indicate they are now offering health insurance than in a 2006 SurePayroll survey. Twenty-eight percent of owners who do not offer the benefit said they thought it was the responsibility of small-business owners to provide a health-care plan for employees.”

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