Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Large Employer Survey: Obamacare to Cost $500 Per Worker Per Year for Next Ten Years

From Jason Millman writing for the Washington Post:
Large companies, including Fortune 500 firms, expect to face costs between $4,800 and $5,900 per worker over the next decade from provisions in President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, according to a new think tank that represents those corporations.

The survey aims to provide a glimpse into what costs the large employers expect if they don’t react to the Affordable Care Act. ...

Companies identified other ACA costs, such as fees for a temporary reinsurance program and a new government-sponsored institute studying the effectiveness of care interventions. They also cited the law’s preventive benefit requirements and a provision allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26 as adding costs. Those two provisions, which have been in effect since 2010, accounted for 1-2 percentage points of the 9 percent increase in employer-sponsored family coverage in 2011, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis. ...