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5500 Preparer's Manual for 2012 Plan Years
The premier resource in the field of Form 5500 preparation, 5500 Preparer's Manual will help you handle the required annual Form 5500 filings for both pension benefits and welfare benefit plans.
Employers are still committed to providing health care benefits for the value they provide in recruiting and retaining workers and for improving employee health and productivity. These are among the conclusions of “Employers’ Views on Incremental Measures to Expand Health Coverage,” a report prepared by researchers at the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) and published in the November/December issue of the journal Health Affairs.
The study is based on telephone interviews of employee benefit managers from 2,995 private and public non-federal employers with at least three employees. The survey was conducted during the first five months of 2005. Responses are weighted by a firm’s number of employees, and the study focuses on firms offering health care benefits in 2005.
The vast majority of firms rated health care benefits as very important or somewhat important in improving employee morale (95%), employee health (91%), and in recruiting and retaining highly-qualified employees (93%).
Employers of all sizes favored benefits policies that required greater administrative action rather rather than greater financial commitment. However, small employers (those with three to 199 employees) were more interested in strategies that made coverage more affordable for them and their employees, while larger employers favored strategies that reduce administrative costs and improve quality.
Two-thirds of the respondents, including those that do not offer health care benefits and those with lower-wage workers agreed with the statement that “all employers should share in the cost of health insurance for employees, either by covering their own workers or by contributing to a fund to cover the uninsured.”
Respondents also supported a federal tax credit for low-income workers to encourage them either to buy their own health insurance or to pay for their share of the employer-provided health insurance premium. The majority of respondents (80%) said that they would be very willing or somewhat willing to reduce eligible employees’ tax withholding by any available tax credit, or to collect the tax credit and apply it to the employee’s premium share (70%). However, the support for these strategies was lukewarm, as most respondents were only “somewhat” willing. Small employers were more likely than large employers to be “very” willing to carry out these measures.
Employers did not favor proposed federal legislation that would pay 60% to 75% of the COBRA continuation of coverage premium for former employees: fewer than half of respondents were in favor and 54% of large employers were opposed. This negative response is due to employers’ belief that such a measure would cost them money from adverse selection, as demonstrated in the Spencer biannual COBRA survey, HSC notes.
About half of the respondents were interested in covering their employees in the same programs as those for state employees or in the federal insurance program covering federal legislators, with small employers and firms that did not offer health benefits much more interested than larger employers. Respondents also were willing to provide eligible low-income employees information on government programs available to them, with 71% of small firms and 55% of large employers “very” willing to do this. However, slightly more than half of small employers, and only 24% of large employers, were “very” willing to assist employees with payroll deductions for premiums to enroll in government programs.
Two-thirds of respondents, especially small employers, considered it important that the federal government reinsure catastrophic health care expenses.
Nearly two-thirds of firms offering health care benefits would consider offering a high-performance provider network that would provide high-quality health care at lower cost, even if this limited participants’ choices. Even small firms providing health care benefits supported this option, although at a smaller rate than large firms (59% versus 66%).
Respondents were fairly evenly divided in favor of the following five strategies suggested to simplify administration: standardization of health care benefits, standardization of payment methods, universally accepted quality performance standards for providers, joint purchasing of health insurance by employers, and joint purchasing of health insurance by employers and public insurance programs.
Among these five strategies, respondents seem to be more inclined to support standardized benefit design, reporting, and payment methods. This is particularly true for large employers, while small employers favored joint purchasing strategies with public insurance programs.
Based on these results, the HSC researchers anticipate incremental reforms, rather than comprehensive overhaul, of the current employer-based health coverage system over the next few years.
“On balance, these survey findings reveal an employer community that continues to maintain a sense of responsibility for the provision of health insurance to its employees,” the HSC researchers concluded. “But employers also appear sensitive to the externalities of free-riding among their colleagues that do not offer coverage: in 2001, employers spent an estimated $31 billion covering people who were employed elsewhere (such as spouses of employees).”
For more information, visit http://www.healthaffairs.org/.
For more information on this and related topics, consult the CCH Pension Plan Guide, CCH Employee Benefits Management, and Spencer's Benefits Reports.
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