Topic: Health Plan Premiums Are Skyrocketing According To New Survey (Read 1064 times)

If you have more than 50 full time employees you have to offer coverage or pay a penalty. The penalty of not offering is $2,000 on every full time employee. The penalty is also not a tax deduction. Offering the plan to only your key people is worse than offering nothing to anyone. Unless you're offering the plan to 95% of your full time folks you'll owe the no-offer $2,000 per person penalty in addition to what you're paying on the plan for the key employees. (Not to mention the non-discrimination headaches that would be triggered.)

I don't know what you mean by more people will be enrolled to fund the ACA. Plans are currently being subjected to three distinct fees. The comparative effectiveness research fee, the health insurer assessment (fully insured plans) and the temporary reinsurance program. It's my understanding that the assessment and temporary reinsurance program go directly to the individual pools and exchanges.

The road of least resistance is for an employer is to offer a rich plan and a lower end plan (maybe more options) and price them such that the execs and key people are the ones that can afford the rich plan and the lower plan doesn't cost more than 9.5% of your lowest paid employee's income.

This is why the defined contribution model is looking attractive at the moment. Offer the plans, offer the contribution your employees choose what the want to spend it on.

The hours thing is absolutely happening to employees on the cusp of 30 hours. Those guys will be scheduled for no more than 27 hours going forward.

I think we will see less and less mid-level companies offering insurance (or only offering it to higher-level jobs) over the next 5+ years as all this is ramping up so there will be more people enrolled to fund the ACA. Even with the penalties being leveraged to change healthcare insurance from a perk to a "right" I think a lot of employers will go the low-road. That and continually lowering hours for those same mid to low level employees.

The way employees buy insurance is going to change as is the way employers subsidize it. There was a good article in Barron's the week before last about the big consultants (AON, Mercer etc) ramping up the defined contribution private exchange model. That will, in theory, give employees access to a choice of more than one carrier and plan; but this model will probably impact employee costs more than the increases in the premium trends...
The same way pensions moved from the defined benefit model to the defined contribution/401k model.

It does make the report, at best, misleading. Asking a broker "how much did your clients' premiums change from 2013 to 2014" then publishing their "findings" doesn't mean much of anything.

In CA, as an example, individual and small group premium tables are filed and approved by the state. A much more interesting and beneficial report would have been analyzing the premiums filed with the state against the benefits.

I can confirm this trend, I am non-US but my premiums rose by 50% when they came up for renewal a couple of weeks ago
Just in one year, very disturbing

Already a health insurance premium in the US costs almost 10 times of that in Singapore or Hong Kong. Actually I wonder why the ordinary Americans don't take this seriously.

 What trend do you guys see coming down the pipe the next few years?

While probably true it does not make the report untrue. Insurance and price is all about risk. Since you can't segment high risk members into higher-priced policies due to ACA the agencies have to increase rates to ensure they don't lose their shirts.

At what point are we doing more good than bad from a monetary perspective?

I always wonder what the basis is when they say "premiums are rising" because there are about 11ty billion things that one could call premium all changing at the same time, so that kind of blanket statement always makes me curious and some of the things that come to mind for example are filed rates, group risk premiums, non risk premiums, individual premiums, some amalgamation of those? Its just a very nebulous statement that really tells you nothing...but that's probably the point.

insurance companies don't make a really high profit. health care in the US is expensive as fuck. Add in the extra BS the ACA requires for every plan and then you get a very large jump in costs

I read it but this article is like 20 days old why even bring it up?

"Health Plan Premiums Are Skyrocketing According To New Survey Of 148 Insurance Brokers, With Delaware Up 100%, California 53%, Florida 37%, Pennsylvania 28%"

Not going to paste the whole article, read it yourself. Is this all because of the money-grubbing insurance companies and their profits, ACA, something entirely different (Bush/GOP?)?

Will more people now be transitioned to Medicaid than was expected or are the multitudes of "youth" who are mandated to carry insurance going to be able to carry the full load once all increases have equaled out? Is this all intentional as a means to single-payer?

Should we ever expect either "side" of the government to tackle the cost of healthcare and medicine instead of the insurance side of it?

Has anyone produced an analysis which shows at what point the benefit (I guess to society as a whole) of ACA will surpass the higher cost of insurance to those who pay?


article herehttp://www.forbes.com/sites/scottgottlieb/2014/04/07/health-plan-premiums-are-skyrocketing-according-to-new-survey-of-148-insurance-brokers-analysts-blame-obamacare/