Florida Employer Health Insurance Costs Dropping, Employee Expenses Rising

Health Insurance Survey

Effective Resources, Inc., in coordination with the HR Florida State Council, a council of the national Society for Human Resource Management, has conducted their annual statewide salary, wage and health insurance benefits survey for the fifth consecutive year and released the results today, with several noteworthy trends emerging.

Five year trends in Florida employee health insurance plans include:

Efforts by employers to reduce their medical insurance premiums appear to be working. More employers are experiencing "no increase" in health insurance premium or premiums in the single digits while fewer employers are seeing increases of 11-20%, 21-30% or higher.

One strategy implemented for employers staying with the "traditional" health insurance plan is to increase deductibles. There is a 9.9% increase in the number of companies with $400 or more deductibles for single coverage. This deductible range was already commonly in use for family coverage.

Also employee out-of-pocket expense has increased by $283 (14%) for employee coverage and a whopping $719 (17%) for dependent coverage since the 2001-2002 survey. While changes have been gradual, they are expected to continue to rise as employers shift cost-sharing.

To ease the double digit premium increases of the past, employers have also shifted some of the cost back to the employee. The percent of the total cost of health insurance benefits paid by the employee for employee coverage is currently 31.6%. This represents an 11.2% increase since 2001. Currently, the employee's cost for dependent coverage is 55.2% representing an increase of 7.9% for the same period. The trend suggests that the employee coverage contribution has leveled out but the dependent coverage will rise another 4.1% by 2007.

Effective Resources, Inc. is a leading human resources consulting firm specializing providing companies assistance with compensation issues, affirmative action plan preparation, salary surveys, employee opinions surveys as well as other areas of human resources. Effective Resources, Inc. has been in business since 1992. Visit its website at: http://wwwEffectiveResources.com