The cost of family health coverage in the U.S. now tops $20,000, an annual survey of employers found, a record high.
Middle-class Americans are bearing the brunt of the rise in health insurance deductibles and medical bills. That’s helped widen political divisions.Advertisement
The seemingly inexorable rise of costs has led to deep frustration with U.S. healthcare, prompting questions about whether a system where coverage is tied to a job can survive. As premiums and deductibles have increased in the last two decades, the percentage of workers covered has slipped as employers dropped coverage and some workers chose not to enroll. Fewer Americans under 65 had employer coverage in 2017 than in 1999, according to a separate Kaiser Family Foundationof federal data.
“What we’ve been seeing is a slow, slow kind of drip-drip erosion in employer coverage,” Altman said. Employees’ costs for healthcare are rising more quickly than wages or overall economy-wide prices, and the working poor have been particularly hard-hit. In firms where more than 35% of employees earn less than $25,000 a year, workers would have to contribute more than $7,000 for a family health plan. It’s an expense that Altman calls “just flat-out not affordable.
The survey is based on responses from more than 2,000 randomly selected employers with at least three workers.Deductibles are rising even faster than premiums, meaning that patients are on the hook for more of their medical costs upfront. For a single person, the average deductible in 2019 was $1,396, up from $533 in 2009.
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