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Benefits account for nearly 20% of total compensation spending, states data from the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institutes’s 2007 study, published last week in the November issue of EBRI Notes.
Employers spent nearly $8 trillion at year-end 2007, up nearly 35% from the year 2000.
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While employees at some of America's most successful businesses do enjoy a healthy range of 401(k) benefits, those working at Facebook, Whole Foods and Amazon.com are not as lucky.
Depending on whom you ask, the nations largest retailer of natural and organic foods can be held up as a model for health care reform for other employers to emulate or dismissed as a notorious cost-shifter that forces employees to ration their care.
In my August EBN editorial, I voiced my growing pessimism about the chances for full health care reform this year. Although at presstime, there still was a small chance for passage of legislation before the August recess, we now know that Congress' self-imposed deadline has come and gone.
Published reports suggest that the idea of taxing employer-provided health insurance is losing ground, though still on the bargaining table. Sen. Kent Conrad (D.-N.D.) has noted that such a proposal appears to be unpopular with voters. Indeed, a recent Quinnipiac University poll of 3,063 people found that 63% of the respondents opposed a tax on employer-provided health benefits, while 55% favored limiting tax deductions for families earning more than $250,000 a year.
Tri-Tec Manufacturing in Kent, Wash., faced a nearly 40% increase in its health care premiums at renewal in 2007 to cover 38 employees. Then after changing insurance carriers, the same scenario unfolded two years later a timeframe during which deductibles soared from $200 to $1,500. That's when the company decided on a radically different approach for its March 1 annual benefits enrollment: contract with a seven-physician group called Qliance, which charges patients $49