Survey: 56% of Employers Expect to Continue Offering Health Coverage

Tags: Affordable Care Act | employer-based insurance | health insurance exchange | health plan | PPACA

Roughly 56 percent employers said they plan to continue to offer employer-based health insurance after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act takes effect, according to a survey from GfK Custom Research North America.

The survey took responses from 502 private-sector companies in the United States, and roughly 12 percent of those respondents said they would be very or somewhat likely to drop the coverage.

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Many companies are worried that healthcare reform provisions will either fail to slow the increase in healthcare costs or will make the cost trends worse. A total of 51 percent think that costs will increase more rapidly due to the PPACA.

However, a paper written by Amy Monahan, JD, and Daniel Schwarcz, JD, of the University of Minnesota Law School contradicts the survey's findings. The authors noted that the PPACA could lead many employers to dump their high-risk employees into the public health insurance exchanges, which could then lead to employers increasing premiums and lowering coverage rates.

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