Health Care Costs: A Primer
This primer on health care spending in the United States reviews the growth in health care spending since 1970 and the impact of health care costs on families and employers.
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Coverage of Colonoscopies Under the Affordable Care Act’s Prevention Benefit
ReportThe Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires private health insurers to cover recommended preventive services such as colonoscopies without any patient cost-sharing. This report finds that confusion over whether colon cancer screenings are preventive care or treatment means patients sometimes receive unexpected bills for the procedure. The report examines cost-sharing practices for colorectal screenings through interviews with experts and officials in the medical and insurance industries. This report was co-authored by The Kaiser Family Foundation, American…
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Explaining Health Reform: How will the Affordable Care Act affect Small Businesses and their Employees?
Fact SheetSeveral provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will likely have significant effects on small businesses, their employees, and families. Currently, smaller businesses are less likely to offer health insurance coverage to their employees than larger companies: 57% of small businesses with 50 or fewer workers offered health benefits to employees, compared to 92% of businesses with 51 to 100 workers, and 97% of businesses with 101 or more workers in 2011.1 This fact sheet explains…
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Average Annual Premiums for Family Health Benefits Top $15,000 in 2011, Up 9 Percent, Substantially More than the Growth in Worker’s Wages, Benchmark Employer Survey Finds
News ReleaseNEWS RELEASESeptember 27, 2011 Average Annual Premiums for Family Health Benefits Top $15,000 in 2011, Up 9 Percent, Substantially More than the Growth in Worker’s Wages, Benchmark Employer Survey FindsAbout 2.3 Million Young Adults Added to Parents’ Plan As a Result of Health Reform At Small Firms, One in Four Covered Workers Face Annual Deductible of $2,000 or More MENLO PARK, Calif. -- After several years of relatively modest premium increases, annual premiums for employer-sponsored…
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Pulling it Together: Business and Health Care Costs
PerspectiveHidden away on page 218 of our annual Employer Health Benefits Survey is a table that shows what employers think of the main strategies they have to control health care costs. More specifically, the table shows what the person in the firm responsible for its health benefits thinks, which is whom we survey. The short answer is, employer confidence in their own ability to control costs is not high. Not more than about a quarter…
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Quick Take: Medicaid MCOs and Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) Requirements
Fact SheetOne mechanism for ensuring that health insurance provides value to consumers for the premiums that they pay, or that others pay on their behalf, is to require insurers to meet a minimum “medical loss ratio” or MLR standard. The MLR is the share of premium revenues that an insurer or health plan spends on patient care and quality improvement activities, as opposed to administration and profits. In a recent 50-state survey on Medicaid managed care,…
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Measuring the Affordability of Employer Health Coverage
PerspectiveA recent draft regulation issued by the Treasury Department describes who is eligible for premium tax credits to help them afford coverage offered through health insurance exchanges beginning in 2014. Tax credits will be available to people with incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the poverty level who are not eligible for public coverage such as Medicaid or Medicare and who are not offered affordable health coverage by an employer. The approach that the…
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Health Insurance Transparency under the Affordable Care Act
PerspectiveIn February, a final rule was issued implementing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requirement that all health plans provide a uniform summary of coverage for all enrollees and applicants. The idea of providing easy-to-understand summaries of coverage is, in fact, the most popular provision in the ACA, according to a recent Kaiser tracking poll. That finding suggests powerful consumer frustration over the complexity of health insurance and the difficulty people face evaluating health insurance choices and understanding…
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Insurance Coverage of Contraceptives
PerspectiveIn this post, we answer some of the key questions about the new contraceptive coverage policy generally, and more specifically, how it will be applied to religious organizations.
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Snapshots: Compensation for Workers with & without Access to Health Benefits at Work
Issue BriefThis paper compares the payroll and benefit compensation of workers that had access to employer-sponsored health benefits at work to that of workers who did not have an insurance offer. Surveys of employers indicate that smaller and lower wage firms are less likely to offer health benefits to workers, but do not provide detailed information about wage and benefit differences for workers with and without an offer of health benefits working in different settings.1 In this Snapshot,…