Your Benefit, Your Cost

Here’s a cohort that’s destined to grow in the next two years: workers whose health-insurance premiums have risen sharply. A Harris poll of corporate human-resources directors finds 75 percent expecting employee premiums to rise, pushed up by “out-of-control” increases in healthcare costs. Seventy percent said their companies plan to increase employees’ share of the costs, and 68 percent expect a rise in the amount employees must pay for their dependents’ coverage. Along the same lines, 38 percent expect to “significantly restrict or reduce” the prescription-drugs benefit, and 20 percent plan to “decrease the scope of covered benefits.”