Health-Care Premiums
Rise Again, Climb 11%
By VANESSA FUHRMANS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 9, 2004 1:04 p.m.
Employer-sponsored health-care premiums rose 11.2% this year, a nationwide survey showed, marking the fourth consecutive year that companies and their employees have been walloped with a double-digit increase in health-benefit costs.
The 3,000-employer survey, conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Health Research and Educational Trust, is considered a key barometer of U.S. companies' health costs, and it contains one glimmer of good news: After seven years of ever-higher premium increases, 2004 was the first in which the rate of growth actually moderated. Last year, employer health-care premiums jumped 13.9%, their fastest clip since 1990.
But after four years of double-digit growth, the cost of providing health care, particularly to employees' family members, is fast becoming unaffordable for many companies, the study's researchers say. The crisis is especially acute for small businesses already struggling with tougher global competition, and discouraging many of them from hiring for new jobs. The average family premium for a preferred provider organization, the type of health plan that covers most workers, now costs more than $10,000 a year.
"The cost of family health insurance is rapidly approaching the gross earnings of a full-time minimum wage worker," said Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health policy research group. "Businesses have to cut back each year, and that's adding to the ranks of the uninsured."
Indeed, the percentage of small employers who offered health benefits to their workers this year declined to 63% from 68% in 2001, according to the survey. Over the same time, the percentage of all workers who received health coverage from their employer dropped to 61% from 65% just three years before. |
