The Annual Summary of Employer Health Benefits for 2011 has been published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an important tool to see the trends of affordable health insurance in Brentwood and the USA.
Here are some highlights:
1)The average annual premium for employer sponsored health insurance in 2011 are $5429 for single coverage and $ 15,o73 for family coverage. This is a 9 % growth rate and significantly higher than in 2010, which was only 3 % . Since 2001 the average health premiums for family coverage has increased 113 %. Interestingly workers in small firms have lower average contributions for single coverage than worker in large firms ( $ 776 vs. $996) .
2) PPO services are by far the most common plan type, enrolling over 55% of covered workers. 17 % percent are enrolled in HMO, 10 % in POS plans and 17%iin HDHP ( HSA plans) The average deductible for small firms in PPO plans is $ 1,202 and in large companies $ 505 for employees.
3) Only sixty percent of firms offer health benefits for their workers, this is a significant reduction from 69 % reported in 2010. For small companies the trends is even more significant. In 2009 47 % of small firms offered health insurance, than in 2010 the number increased to 59 % and in 2011 fall back to 48 % .
4) Small firms are more likely to have a grandfathered health plan, meaning a plan which does not offer all the advantage of health care reform, such as free preventive care, than large firms.
5) An estimated 2.3 million adult children were enrolled in their parent’s employer sponsored health plan due to the Affordable Care Act (coverage of adult children to age 26 )
The trend of health insurance premium growth is still continuing, combined with a shift of higher percentage contributions by workers, which causes the workers to have less disposable income. This summary shows that only actively shopping the health insurance market, will help to find affordable health insurance in Brentwood.