Employer-based health coverage likely to stay awhile
WASHINGTON — Get your insurance through your employer? The ongoing political turmoil around “Obamacare” all but guarantees you’ll still be able to do that.
Ask Walt Rowen, whose business is etching glass but whose experience managing century-old, family-owned Susquehanna Glass makes him something of an expert on health care. He’s provided coverage to employees, then cancelled it, steering them to the health insurance exchange. But with those premiums rising, Rowen this year is again covering his 70 or so workers under the umbrella of employer-sponsored health insurance.
Employer-provided health insurance is so ingrained in the American workplace that people expect it to continue even as politicians thrash out the role of government in health care. That’s according to polling, business owners and consumers. And in a nearly saturated labour market, employers don’t want to give workers a reason to work somewhere else.
“I think a company — any size company — would be incredibly afraid to just cancel its insurance policy and say the hell with it,” says Rowen, whose company is located in Columbia, Pennsylvania. He said that could result in employees fleeing, especially in states where the Affordable Care Act insurance markets are weak.