Kaiser Report Forecasts Pain in Employer-Provided Care

One of the top challenges of selling health care reform is that the vast majority of Americans -- and more than 90 percent of voters -- already have health care. What's more, more than 80 percent consistently say their coverage and quality are good. So how do you sell a trillion-dollar reform of something that people already have and like? You convince them that the good times can't roll on forever, that pain is on the way. If Obama wants to persuade employees with health care that reform is necessary, he should definitely point to this survey. This is what the pain looks like:

Here are the quick and dirty stats from the Kaiser survey: 40 percent of employers plan on increasing out-of pocket expenses for workers; about the same are raising annual deductibles and the prescription drug payments; 9 percent plan on tightening eligibility; 8 percent said they plan on dropping coverage completely.

What do the health care plans on Capitol Hill try to do about that? To improve insurance coverage, Democrats want to require coverage for preventative care, ban insurance companies' ability to rescind coverage when you get sick and ban exclusions based on pre-existing conditions.

But on the cost side? The picture is murkier. On the one hand, a universal mandate to buy health insurance could lower the price of coverage for everybody, because the ranks of the uninsured include young people who would be forced to pay for coverage that they are, as a demographic, less likely to consume. But labor groups seeking their own holy trinity of health care reform -- (1) an employer mandate (2) no taxes on health-care benefits, and (3) a public insurance option -- will be disappointed by Max Baucus' Senate bill, which bats 0-for-3 in those requirements. Instead the bill will likely raise the price of employer provided insurance by enacting a tax on expensive plans that will likely be passed along to employers in the form of higher rates. The trouble with cutting costs is cast in high-definition here: Employees don't want to pay a dime more for insurance premiums that are already eating into their salaries, and insurance companies are holding fast to their profit margins.