As a growing number of companies are seeking to be able to continue to afford to provide their workers with health insurance, plans with high deductibles are becoming increasingly popular and are requiring those employees to pay more while receiving less.
According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s survey data from December, 2011, 27.7 million people of working age had a health insurance plan with a deductible of a minimum of $1,000 for individuals and a minimum of $2,000 for families. According to the report on the survey, the percentage of people in the United States with insurance and who have this type of high deductible coverage has increased by more than double since 2005.
There is only one reason that employers are now turning to this type of health plan, and that is its price. Since 2001, there has been more than a doubling of the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance every year, bringing it to an annual average of $15,073 for the employee and employer combined in 2011.
The source of those figures is the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation survey, performed in partnership with the Health Research and Educational Trust from the American Hospital Association. They also showed that at the same time, that a high deductible plan through the use of a health savings account for family coverage costs an annual average of $13,704.
In order to make it easier to afford healthcare, many employees with high deductible health insurance are following the advice of their insurance agents, who are suggesting supplemental health insurance plans that can be purchased on an individual basis to fill in the gap of what is not offered by the employer.
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