Employer Sponsored Insurance: Unfair and Unaffordable

By ROGER COLLIER For all those Americans faced with higher health insurance premiums or less coverage (that’s most of us), the temptation is to blame the Affordable Care Act. Maybe instead we should be blaming the one thing the ACA didn’t significantly change: employer sponsored insurance—the norm for most working Americans. Although the ACA imposed some new standards for coverage, ESI employers remain free to dictate most insurance details, the tax-exclusion of ESI benefits is largely unchanged, ESI premiums are still generally independent of income, and small employers can still offer ESI or not. Unfortunately for millions of workers, it’s a model that’s increasingly neither affordable nor equitable. What seemed a reasonable approach fifty or sixty years ago when healthcare costs were far lower is now one of the most regressive health insurance systems in the industrialized world. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s most recent employee benefits report demonstrates the problem. Average ESI premiums are now $6,250 for an individual and $17,500 for a family. Most workers must pay part of the premium, with contributions averaging rather more than $1,000 for individuals and around $5,000 for family coverage. Most employees are also faced when they need care with substantial deductibles, averaging $1,300 for an individual and two or three times that for a family. (These figures are averages; in many cases, especially for smaller firms, the numbers are much higher.) The o...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: THCB Roger Collier Source Type: blogs