About 10 years ago I was in local government, we laid off teachers every single year in order to keep paying health insurance premiums for the rest of them. More money for less bodies.
[1]http://business.time.com/2009/09/16/health-insurance-premium...
[2]http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Long_Term_...
(edit: fixed my numbers thanks to twoodfin)
Not even close[1].
CAGR of U.S. health care expenditures 1990-2012: 6.05%
CAGR of U.S. health care expenditures 2000-2012: 5.59%
And that's total spending, not accounting for population growth.
Health care expenditures have grown faster than inflation, but not anywhere near 15% annually.
[1] http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Stat...
Paying a bunch of idiots to run around and generate paperwork isn't profitable, but the money's still gone.
http://business.time.com/2009/09/16/health-insurance-premium...
Healthcare premiums up 131% in 10 years.. that comes out closer to 9% than 6%. And doesn't include co-pays or anything that insurance doesn't cover.
EDIT: For the record, this kind of industry BS is why liberals support single-payer healthcare. It's not that we're commies or even that we don't understand the inefficiency of government bureaucracy. It's that we'd prefer the dumb public bureaucracy to our current even dumber private bureaucracy. Something being 'private' without pricing pressure isn't capitalism.
Sure, but that would show up in the CMS numbers, and it doesn't.
Insurers are absolutely price-conscious, both of what they pay for and what they charge. It's not as if businesses will accept year after year double digit increases without shopping around. If there were big money to be made undercutting existing insurers, someone would go after that market, but there isn't: Health insurance profit margins are low single digits at best.
Not with the ACA limits on share of premium costs not going to care they couldn't. Before the ACA, they certainly could.
> For the record, this kind of industry BS is why liberals support single-payer healthcare. It's not that we're commies or even that we don't understand the inefficiency of government bureaucracy. It's that we'd prefer the dumb public bureaucracy to our current even dumber private bureaucracy.
> Something being 'private' without pricing pressure isn't capitalism.
Yes, it is capitalism. Its not free, efficient, competitive market, but its certainly capitalism.
How does that cost-of-healthcare increase change the overall cost of employing someone? Clue: it's a lot less than 15%.
If you're laying off employees just for this reason, you're either doing something wrong or you're making political excuses.
Great article by Michael Lewis on how healthcare and retirement costs grow to consume such a large share of a city's budget that very little is left for actual public services.
Eighty percent of the city’s budget—and the lion’s share of the claims that had
thrown it into bankruptcy—were wrapped up in the pay and benefits of public-safety
workers... The public-safety workers thought that the city was out to screw
them on their contracts; the citizenry thought that the public-safety
workers were using fear as a tool to extort money from them... the police and
fire departments have been cut in half; some number
of the citizens ... say they no longer felt safe in their own homes. All
other city services had been reduced effectively to zero. “Do you know
that some cities actually pave their streets? That’s not here.”
(Starting on page 4)
Health care is an issue where you _cannot_ ignore the low-probability worst case scenarios but instead must always be ready to respond to them. So the bigger the group of people that are insured together, the better, which obvious leaves one scenario as best: Every citizen of a state pays into and recieves from one single health care pool.
Anyway, I wish you best of luck. I hope you find a way to make things work.