How the High Price of Health Insurance & Health Care can hurt Businesses

Welcome to this installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. For this edition I found a couple of interesting articles relating to health insurance, reform, and how the price of each affects businesses that have to pay for much of it. Our first article comes from MSNBC and is entitled, “Health care headache for small businesses.” The article looks at how businesses, due to the high cost of health coverage, are dropping it entirely.

This, in turn, is causing employees to leave their jobs, even in the current economy, in order to find a job that does offer benefits. According to a survey by an unnamed credit card company, 85% of small business owners surveyed didn’t even offer health insurance at all. However, not all companies are following this trend. According to the article, several companies are also asking their employees to pay for more of the premium, which is helping employers and employees, but the article doesn’t seem to think it’s enough in the long haul.

The article goes onto mention some suggestion which business owners might find helpful, such as using health savings accounts, providing stipends to employees and constantly shopping around for the best insurance deals. Overall I’d think this is a very useful article for business owners looking to save costs as well as retain good employees.

The other article we will look at is entitled, “Blueprints for a health care fix” and comes to us from CNN. In this article, they discuss how the debate on health care reform can affect businesses. For example, one proposed bill will eliminate employer-based health insurance entirely and mandate people to purchase insurance from private insurance companies. Other proposed legislation would open up insurance pools and provide subsidies to small businesses.

The effects these plans upon businesses could be widespread, but as of now are unknown. It will be interesting to see how businesses fare in terms of health insurance coverage for their employees with new legislation such as this in the pipeline. In conclusion, we will try to cover this angle more often, as most people get health insurance through their employers, and an overhaul or major change to the current system will affect many of us.

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