It's a simple, sad fact of life: Employees need to pony up more for their own health care costs.
As employers look to cut costs that never seem to stop climbing faster than inflation, while employees bristle at giving up any of their hard-fought benefits, the only wiggle room appears to be the distribution of the tab.
And it looks like that's where most of you are headed – at least according to the latest numbers from the 17th annual Top 5 Total Rewards Priorities survey from the International Society of Certified Employee Benefit Specialists and Deloitte Consulting.
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That being said, the survey hints that most employers are standing pat on both benefits costs and cuts until we see some resolution on the health reform front.
Even so, it looks like you're expecting the worse (and rightfully so) as 85 percent of employers anticipate reform to increase health costs (and doesn't that defy the whole point of the thing to begin with?). And 62 percent of employers fully expect to share those costs with employees.
Rising health costs – with or without reform – remains a simple fact of life, despite the politically stated goals of the landmark legislation. It's your job to walk employees through this gauntlet, intelligently, apolitically and (hopefully) emphatically. Because at the end of the day, we're sharing much more than premiums.
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