Skip to main content

Just How Secure Is Your Employer-Based Health Insurance?
Last week, the Economic Policy Institute released a disturbing report revealing just how many white-collar workers have lost their employer-based health insurance in recent years—even though they didn’t change jobs.

Many workers believe that if they hold onto their job, their insurance is safe. Professionals with jobs near the top of the occupational ladder are especially likely to assume that their employer is not going to cut their coverage. That may well have been true in the 1990s, when the job market was tight—but not today.

The EPI report shows that in just the first six years of this century, the share of U.S. workers with employer-provided health insurance (EPHI) fell from 51.1 percent to 48.8 percent. Moreover, workers in white-collar occupations—including executives, managers, and workers in professional specialties—were just as likely as blue-collar workers to lose their safety net.

Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise, since employers typically pay a much larger share of premiums for higher-income employees, as I discussed on HealthBeat last month. So as insurance premiums soar (up 78 percent since 2001), employers are beginning to chafe under the very costly burden of providing first-class benefits to white-collar employees. (Insurance premiums rose “only” 6.1 percent in 2007, but going forward, experts expect sharper increases because the cost of medical technology continues to skyrocket).

http://www.healthbeatblog.org/2008/04/just-how-secure.html
Original Post

Add Reply

Post

Untitled Document
×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×