One of my friends who runs a doctor's office posted this:
FYI, what does a "good" health plan cost a small business these days? For us it's $654/month/employee this year, going up to $879/month/employee next year. One person has family coverage, that's $1,831 this year and $2,462 next year.
Why so high? With only one exception on our plan, we're all pretty much young and healthy. Because the premium goes up between 25% and 35% a year, every single year. Why? Because it does. Today one of the things I am doing is collecting forms for a different insurance company because as a small business, we can't pay $10,500 per year per employee for insurance.
We only cover four single employees, and one + spouse and child (out of 11 employees total, the others have through a spouse). And no group we can pool with will allow us to buy the type of coverage that we want to offer.
Yes, these numbers are insane. But they were completely and totally reasonable five years ago, before the average 30% increase automatically, each year, related to nothing except that's their policy.
And she thought $300 per month per employee was high in 2004 when she opened the practice. I wish I could see growth rates like that.
In response Finnegan05 wrote:
My nonprofit with 130 employees has seen insurance rise from $400,000/yearly eight years ago to $1.5 million for 2009-2010. That's nearly 20% of our budget, up from 8% of our budget 8 years ago. Co pays and out of pocket went from about $10 for a prescription to about $35. I shudder to think of the extra people we could hire and services we could provide with access to even $500,000 of that money.
So, if you know how much you're company is paying, and by how much the rates have increased in the past few years, please post those numbers.