The number of private sector employers offering health insurance to their workers remained about stable in 2013 while the premium sharing formulas they use remained variable—and thus difficult to compare directly with the FEHB—a study has found.
The Kaiser Family Foundation said that overall only 57 percent of firms offer any health insurance to their employees, unchanged from 2012 after a number of years of steady decline in that benefit in the private sector job market. Meanwhile, the number of employees who were “grandfathered” into coverage as companies dropped coverage for new employees continued to decline as those covered workers changed jobs or retired.
The employee-employer shares of the total premiums remained the same. Covered workers contributed on average about 18 percent of the premium for self-only coverage and 29 percent for family coverage; in the FEHB program, the percentage is about 30 percent for both types of coverage. However, the private sector figure applies only to those with employer-sponsored health care at all, and within its averages there are variations by size of company, percentage of lower-wage workers and other factors.
Also, within the average employee premium share there was a wide range of practices. For example, several percent of covered workers have the premiums fully paid by the employer while about 14 percent of employees have to pay more than half of the total premium cost.
There also are substantial variations among plan features such as required deductibles, prescription drug out of pocket costs and more.
