How companies would react to President Obama’s reform plan has been a big question mark in considering how the health care landscape will shape up in the coming years. Perhaps the biggest reason employers have been slow to reveal their strategies is that they don’t necessarily have one—there’s so much to digest in the White House health care bill that it could take quite some time for most employers to turn it all into something resembling a policy.
A new study from Fidelity Investments reveals that most of them are trying to do exactly that. Over the month of June, the employer-benefits provider surveyed 459 U.S. companies, and found that 84 percent of them are either already rethinking their health care benefits, or plan to do so this year.
That’s potentially unnerving news for the 160 million Americans who get their coverage through work. However, a solid majority of the companies polled, 64 percent, said they were not seriously considering eliminating health coverage. About 20 percent said are considering dropping coverage, most of these respondents being small businesses. Overall, 85 percent of employers said health care coverage would continue to be as important or more important in recruiting and retaining employees in the future.
That doesn’t mean, however, that big changes aren’t on the way. From the report:
When asked about the health plan design that would be most attractive to their organization going forward, more than half (55%) of the larger employers chose a high deductible health plan (HDHP), followed by a preferred provider organization (PPO) (45%) and a health maintenance organization (HMO) (18%). If the respondent’s organization was already using an HDHP as one of their health care options, they were?more likely to consider this plan type to be the more likely option for the future, with 60 percent of this group choosing HDHP as making the most sense for their organization.
The weirdest thing is that these results match up very well with a story Time Magazine did last month on employer mandates in the health care legislation—especially the 64 percent stat for employers who are powering through the new rules. Though opponents have called the legislation a “job-killing employer mandate,” Time’s Kate Pickert says it may not turn out to be such bad news for U.S. companies:
But at least in San Francisco, where an employer mandate was instituted in 2008, most business owners are embracing the new rule and reporting it's had little impact on their operations. A new analysis of the city's mandate, written by three economists, reports that although three-quarters of employers were forced to bump up their health-insurance spending, 64% still support the law. "Employers have found that it's actually become easier to pay for it than they thought," says Arindrajit Dube, one of the authors and a labor economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Massachusetts and Hawaii, the article points out, also have employer mandates for health care, and they are the top two states in the country for providing universal coverage (Massachusetts has a 95 percent coverage rate; Hawaii, 92 percent).
Whether it can work on a national scale remains to be seen. In the meantime, both employers and employees trying to get a handle on what the health care legislation will mean in their workplace should check out PayScale’s summary of the biggest changes over the next two years.
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