Corporate News: Workplace Health Premiums Continue Climb but Rate Slows
Health-care premiums paid by employers and their workers rose again in 2008, though more slowly than in recent years, and more employees grappled with deductibles of $1,000 and higher, a nationwide survey showed.</br></br>The average premium rose 5% in 2008, according to an annual poll of nearly 2,000 employers by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust. The widely watched barometer of health-care costs, released Wednesday, does offer some faint consolation: The increase wasn't much changed from last year's and a far cry from the 13% to 14% increase of five years ago.</br></br>Another large employer survey released Wednesday, by employee- benefits consultancy Towers Perrin, projected a 6% rise in premiums for 2009. That is in line with a survey by Hewitt Associates earlier this week, which predicted a 6.4% increase in companies' health-care costs next year.</br></br>Consumers are struggling with record health-care costs -- which have climbed at several times the rate of inflation and wage increases for the past decade -- just as they face a barrage of economic pressures, from declining retirement-savings accounts to higher energy and food prices. The annual cost of an average family health plan rose to $12,680 this year, more than double the $5,791 it cost in 1999, according to the Kaiser survey. Workers' annual contributions to those premiums have also more than doubled, to $3,354 in 2008 from $1,543 in 1999.</br></br>What's more, employees are taking on an increasingly greater share of health-care spending beyond premiums. The biggest shift in costs has come in the form of rising deductibles. About 18% of all workers with some kind of health coverage face deductibles of at least $1,000, up from 12% in 2007.