NOTEBOOK: Iowa employers still foot majority of health premium costs
JOE GARDYASZ Sep 12, 2018 | 7:45 pm
2 min read time
374 wordsBusiness Record Insider, The Insider NotebookIowa employers continue to pay higher health insurance premiums to provide that benefit to their workers, according to the latest statewide survey by David P. Lind Benchmark. And if your employer is like mine and the majority of companies in Iowa, they’re paying the lion’s share of those premiums and doing a lot to keep health insurance as affordable as possible.
Compared with 2017, the total cost of employer-based health insurance premiums rose 8.4 percent in 2018, Lind’s survey found. That increase is an average that factors in employers whose rates went down or stayed the same along with those that increased. Also, the average increase represents the additional cost prior to design changes employers made to their medical plans, such as increasing cost-sharing arrangements with employees.
The survey, which included responses from 1,001 organizations around the state, found that the total cost of health premiums averaged $6,874 for employee-only coverage in 2018, and the cost of family coverage increased to an average of $17,450 in combined costs for the employer and employee. Those figures were up 5.7 percent and 10.8 percent, respectively, from the last survey conducted in 2016.
Notably, Iowa employers on average pay about 80 percent of the total cost of health premiums for employee-only coverage, and foot about 70 percent of the cost of family coverage for their employees, which Lind found to be similar to figures in his last two surveys.
Although the majority of companies — 77 percent — said their premiums increased for 2018, none of the companies that responded to the survey said they stopped offering insurance because of the increases. And while 60 percent of employers said they passed some or all of the premium increases along to their workers, 22 percent of the companies said they absorbed the entire increase. (See chart.)
Nearly 1 in 5 employer health plans increased their deductibles in response to higher costs in 2018, the survey found. The average deductible that Iowa employees are required to pay in 2018 for single coverage ($1,900) is $273 higher when compared with the 2016 average ($1,627), representing a 17 percent increase. The 2018 family deductible ($3,899) is $517 higher — a 15 percent increase — when compared with the 2016 deductible.