State health insurance exchanges created under the new health care law are in turmoil. By contrast, the employer market — where the majority of Americans still get their coverage — seems like a bastion of stability.
An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation released on Wednesday shows that the share of employers offering coverage remained steady this year, and that the cost of premiums for health plans remained largely unchanged.
“We see historic moderation in premiums and health spending and costs,” said Drew Altman, the chief executive of the Kaiser foundation, a nonprofit in Menlo Park, Calif., that closely tracks the health insurance markets.
But underneath some of those figures, some important changes are underway. The biggest shift is that workers continue to pay an ever-greater share of their medical bills, a trend for several years now. That is why Mr. Altman said that despite the overall moderation in costs, “it doesn’t feel that way to average people.”
Kaiser’s annual survey of employer health benefits represents a yearly snapshot of the coverage companies offer their workers, and highlights from the survey are being published online in Health Affairs, an academic journal. About 150 million people are covered by an employer, a much larger group than the 11 million or so who buy coverage on the exchanges created under the federal health care law. On Tuesday, the Census Bureau reported that the percentage of uninsured Americans fell last year, to 9.1 percent, in part because of the strength of the employer market.
