More on employee contributions for Medical Coverage....

No bigger hot-button topic than what your talent has to pay for medical coverage via employee contributions.  Here's the updated info that's been made publicly available recently to help gauge where you are at in the food chain:

---Private-Sector companies - The Kaiser Family Foundation, a health care research organization that annually tracks the cost of health insurance, reported in, an annual cost survey, that PPO coverage is the most costly option.   For family coverage, companies pay $1,008 per month under fully insured plans, with employees picking up $3,281 annually of that cost, or $126 per pay period (assumes 26 pay periods).

---Federal Government - The Washington Post reports that the government sponsors 283 different health care plans, the most popular of which are two Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans (most likely the gold-plated PPO variety). Enrollees in these plans will see their premium costs go up between 3% and 8.5% in 2008. The bi-weekly premium, for families in the standard option plan, will be $145.14, $10.84 more than this year.   About 60% of federal employees are reported to be in the BCBS network at various coverage levels (ee only, EE+1, Family).

While it's hard to get plan quality details from this top level report, it's clear that more and more companies are being more aggressive with cost sharing on the medical plan side.  Additionally, the cost share on the Federal Government side is much more aggressive than I was expecting.  More detail from the Post report shares that the Federal Government picks up about 70 percent of premium costs in its role as employer.

Interesting data - compare and contrast with the total comp value play at your company...

Comments

[Steve Schuster]

Premiums will keep going up until users of the healthcare system become better informed. There are some sites to get that information in easy to understand language. Most notable is www.healthcaresoundoff.com. Employers and HR folks should start sending it to their employees so at least they receive information regularly that could help them navigate the system.