Employer-based Insurance under Health Reform will mean Higher Costs in Short Term

Time (10/27, Pickert) reports that the employer-based system has become equally or more unsustainable than the overall "US healthcare system." Employee contributions to those premiums "went up 128 percent" from 1999 to 2009; and surveys indicate about "40 percent of employers will shift" even more costs onto employees in 2010.

Health reform proposals will do "little to change" that, although an "excise tax" on "Cadillac" policies will help in the long-term, as will several things more employers are now doing. These include replacing co-pays with "co-insurance" in which patients a percent "of the actual cost"; offering "wellness programs," which focus on getting high health-cost "workers to lose weight or quit smoking"; and conducting "dependent audits."

Still, it will take a long time before these programs begin "slowing costs" meaning that "under the reform proposals," employees face increasingly "higher costs" coupled with "fewer benefits" and choices.