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Tag: Cost of Affordable Healthcare

Wal-Mart Cuts Some Part-Time Health Benefits

 

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Wal-Mart Stores plans to eliminate health insurance coverage for some of its part-time U.S. employees in a move aimed at controlling rising health care costs of the nation’s largest private employer.

Starting Jan. 1, Wal-Mart told The Associated Press that it will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week. The move, which would affect 30,000 employees, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees.

“We had to make some tough decisions,” Sally Wellborn, Wal-Mart’s senior vice president of benefits, told The Associated Press.

Wellborn says the company will use a third-party organization to help part-time workers find insurance alternatives: “We are trying to balance the needs of (workers) as well as the costs of (workers) as well as the cost to Wal-Mart.”

Read the full article here.

Contact Steven G. Cosby, MHSA with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

ACA Will Raise Employer Costs and Spur Trade-Offs

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Employers are struggling to understand how the Affordable Care Act will impact their businesses. But one thing is becoming clear: They’ll have to pay more, and that means some things may have to go.

Health care benefit costs could increase between 4 and 5 percent next year, The Washington Post reported citing results of employer surveys by Towers Watson, the National Business Group on Health and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Among the big worries for companies is the possibility they will have to pay an excise tax on high-cost plans. Towers Watson found 81 percent of firms it surveyed are exploring ways to reduce their plan costs to avoid the 40 percent surcharge on annual benefits that exceed $10,200 for individuals or $27,500 for families.

Read the full article here.

Contact Steven G. Cosby, MHSA with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

Companies Race to Adjust Health-Care Benefits as Affordable Care Act Takes Hold

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Large businesses expect to pay between 4 and 5 percent more for health-care benefits for their employees in 2015 after making adjustments to their plans, according to employer surveys conducted this summer.

Few employers plan to stop providing benefits with the advent of federal health insurance mandates, as some once feared, but a third say they are considering cutting or reducing subsidies for employee family members, and the data suggest that employees are paying more each year in out-of-pocket health care expenses.

The figures come from separate electronic surveys given to thousands of mid- to large-size firms across the country by Towers Watson, the National Business Group on Health and PriceWaterhouseCoopers, consulting groups that engage with businesses on health insurance issues.

Bracing themselves for an excise tax on high-cost plans coming in 2018 under the Affordable Care Act, 81 percent of employers surveyed by Towers Watson said they plan to moderately or significantly alter health-care benefits to reduce their costs.

Read the full article here.

Contact Steven G. Cosby, MHSA with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

Health Spending on the Rise

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National health spending will increase modestly over the next decade, propelled in part by the gradual rebound of the U.S. economy and the growing ranks of Americans who became insured under the Affordable Care Act, government actuaries projected. But those growth rates are not as high as what the country saw for the two decades before the Great Recession, according to the report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary, issued Wednesday.

The actuaries estimate that health spending grew just 3.6% in 2013, the fifth year of historically low rates of spending growth. But it will accelerate to 5.6% this year. They also forecast that the average growth rate for 2015-2023 would be 6%. That is up just slightly from last year’s projection.

Read the full article here.

Contact Steven G. Cosby, MHSA with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.