Another fact that supports the cause for HCR now:
http://bulletin.aarp.org/yourhealth/policy/articles/rising_health_care_costs_mean_less_pay_fewer_raises_lost_jobs.html
The rising costs of the health insurance Richmond buys for his workers substantially restricts his ability to give those workers a raise. “It is a pay cut for my employees,” he says, or a raise they didn’t get.
The sharp spikes in health care costs also make Richmond less likely to hire new workers since offering health care “raises the cost of hiring someone substantially,” he says.
As Congress debates reforms designed to expand insurance coverage and slow the rising cost of health care, business executives and economists say the crippling annual increases in insurance premiums are a silent tax on American workers and the companies that hire them. Today the average premium for employer-sponsored health insurance is $13,375 a year for family coverage, with employers paying nearly 75 percent, or $9,860, according to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“We can’t sustain this broken system,” says Richmond. “I sure hope something happens.”
“All my clients are struggling to deal with this,” says Matt Swinnerton, a broker who sells health care plans to businesses for the Precept Group in San Ramon, Calif. Rising health care costs, he says, are “the silent killer of compensation for employees.”
Permitting premiums to continue to climb unchecked “is simply unsustainable for families, for businesses, for state budgets and for our national economy,” Vice President Joe Biden said in a September speech to state insurance commissioners in the Washington suburbs.
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Premiums rise 131 percent; wages, 38 percent
According to the Kaiser study, health insurance premiums across America have climbed 131 percent since 1999—far more rapidly than workers’ wages, which rose 38 percent, or inflation, which rose 28 percent in the same period.