Latest Good News in Health Spending: Employer Premiums
By: Margot Sander-Katz (NY Times) September 2014
We’re in the midst of a rare slowdown in the growth of health spending. That slowdown just hit the employer health insurance market.
On Wednesday, the Kaiser Family Foundation published its annual survey on the health plans that employers are offering their workers. It’s large and comprehensive and generally regarded as the most reliable measure of what’s happening in the employer market.
The big finding is that the growth in health insurance premiums was only 3 percent between 2013 and 2014. That’s tied for the lowest rate of increase since Kaiser started measuring (this is the 16th year of the survey).
For the past few years, health spending as measured in all kinds of ways has been encouraging. Spending growth in Medicare and Medicaid are down. National health spending is down. But employer health premiums were a little slower to catch on.
The growth in employer premiums has typically been in the double digits every year. That runaway growth has meant problems for workers and the economy. Over the past few decades, employers began dropping health coverage, and premium increases eroded income growth. Some talked about the employer benefit system as a doomed anachronism. The new trend, if it holds, looks a lot more sustainable.
