Owners of small and mid-sized businesses wish policymakers would take more notice of their health benefits problems.
About 92% of the owners who participated in a recent online survey agreed with the statement that “government leaders aren’t doing enough” to address their health benefits problems. Even more, 93%, agreed that policymakers should come up with a new way for them to offer health benefits.
Only 12% of the business owners that were offering group health benefits said they were confident that they would still be able to do that three years from now, according to a summary of the results posted by eHealth, the web broker that sponsored the survey.
The sample included about 500 owners of businesses with 500 or fewer employees. The survey was conducted in July.
The cash-for-coverage plan question: EHealth wants to help employers use individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements and qualified small employer HRAs to create “cash for coverage” plans, or vehicles for letting workers use employer cash to buy their own individual coverage.
When the Business Group on Health polled 121 large employers for its latest employer health benefits survey, just 3% of the participants said they were “strongly considering” holding down benefits costs by replacing traditional health benefits with a cash-for-coverage plan.
In fact, eplacing traditional benefits with cash-for-coverage plans was the least popular cost-saving strategy included in the survey question.
Analysts at eHealth maintain that their survey shows that small and midsize employers are much more interested in ICHRAs and other cash-for-coverage plan strategies.
Only 46% of the employers eHealth surveyed said they were familiar with ICHRAs, but 75% said they would like to have a way to provide defined monetary contributions that workers could use to buy their own health coverage, according to eHealth.
The backdrop: In the early 2000s, as members of Congress were debating the proposals that led to passage of the Affordable Care Act, reports about employers’ problems with paying for health benefits dominated the news and came out at many House and Senate hearings.
In recent years, members of Congress and other policymakers have focused more on concerns about Medicaid, Medicare and the individual commercial coverage sold through the Affordable Care Act public exchange system.
Small employers have been coping with rising costs in the fully insured small-group market by shifting to use of self-insured plans.
If small employers find that offering even self-insured plans is unaffordable, that could lead to a decrease in the percentage of small and mid-sized employers that offer any kind of group health coverage or cash-for-coverage plan and force policymakers to pay more attention to them.