Health Insurance and Employers

Image taken from Wallae.com

All employers are having a difficult time deciding to continue offering health insurance coverage to their employees. The cost for even a low cost health insurance policy has become very expensive as costs are getting out of control. Unbelievably, most employers really are having a difficult time with this decision. This is because when you were hired, an affordable health insurance policy was part of the hiring package.

You could say that the employers and the employees have come to an impasse in the larger spectrum of all that is going on today. Employers want to offer every employee at least a low cost health insurance policy as part of the hiring package. Of course, even when you must pay a partial amount from each paycheck it is a minimal amount at best.

The practice of adding health insurance coverage as part of the hiring package began when the veterans from World War II were returning home and in search of employment in the private sector. The employers of the day offered health insurance policies as an advertising ploy to gain the best and brightest employees over other business institutions who did not offer health insurance.

Today though, the health insurance policy costs are out of control and there does not seem to be an end in sight. Now with the health care reform bill passage employers are taking a second look at health insurance benefits.  The fines to the various employers for lack of health insurance coverage per employee is set at two thousand dollars per year.

Employers are finally seeing a loophole that they might have an opportunity to collect. Why should any employer pay tens of thousands of dollars for affordable health insurance coverage to their employees when they could pay the newly mandated penalty fee of two thousand dollars per employee? Consider the savings per employee, per year. Forfeiting health insurance coverage to employees would be a cost savings factor to all employers.

The burden of purchasing an affordable health insurance policy would then fall upon the shoulders of each employee. These new health insurance mandates will not affect small business employers for the time being, but it will hurt all the larger corporations.

When these same employers set up health care wellness centers it will only add to the overall costs and cut into the corporate profits. Will their employees be mandated to attend these health care wellness centers? Some corporations are doing just that.