Health Insurance Trends

Health Insurance Trends - an overview

The past few years have been difficult for the United States from a health insurance perspective. Faced with rising costs of healthcare, everyone agrees that something needs to be done about it, but no one agrees on what it is. This is probably a good thing, since a famous man once said that for every major problem, there is a simple solution that doesn't work. Let's take a look at some of the macroeconomic health insurance trends.

Health Insurance Trends - Premiums

Health insurance premiums have shown a steady rise over the past few years. This has specially affected small business owners struggling to provide health insurance coverage for their employees. In the face of this increase, business have been offloading most of these costs onto the employees who now have to pay more and more for health insurance from their employer. This is slowly leading to the realization that it might not be all that great to have health insurance from the firm one works for. In fact, many firms have stopped providing health insurance coverage to their employees for this very reason.

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Private health insurance firms have seized the initiative and many of them offer great coverage at an affordable price with schemes that can be tailored to individual preferences unlike those that are corporate sponsored. But there is a limit to how low they can go as the premiums have been increasing in this area as well.

Overall, while the average inflation is around 3%, the increase in the health care premiums has been well over 10%.

Number of people with health insurance

Along with rising premiums as outlined before, the number of Americans without health insurance has been steading increasing. And with the recent slowdown, this number has begun to explode. Over 46 million Americans are currently without any health insurance. That's just shy of twenty percent of the population, or one fifth.

Some myths need to broken here. It is often assumed that those without insurance are either non naturalized citizens or those who are unemployed. The truth is very different. 80 percent of those who are uninsured are full time citizens of the United States with full time jobs. This is largely due to businesses not providing group health insurance any more. Also, 10% of all children are without coverage.

Why is this happening?

There is no doubt that the root cause of these problems are rapidly rising premiums that far outstrip the expected rise. Several reasons contribute to this including the fact that a greater percentage of the population is aging and the cost of these people need to be covered by the premiums from those not at risk - spreading the risk so to say.

Other factors include the increased cost of drugs as well as increased testing costs and the fact that doctors need to get paid more. Administrative and marketing costs are skyrocketing as well. As of now, there's no end in sight.

What can you do?

Your best tool is the Internet and a site like www.healthquotes.com where you can research rates and perform an apples to apples comparison of all the health plans. You can make the best of the situation and beat the health insurance trends!