Local survey: Companies dropping spousal health coverage

A growing number of local companies are cutting back on health insurance benefits offered to employees' spouses, according to the annual Medical and Prescription Drug Benefits survey by Conrad Siegel Actuaries.

"To soften the increase to the company budget, many employers have increased plan premiums for spousal coverage or have eliminated coverage for spouses who have access to their own employer-sponsored coverage," said Rob Glus, a partner at the firm.

The survey included more than 100 companies of all sizes and various industries, with 61 percent coming from organizations with more than 100 employees. It found that about 25 percent of all the companies do not cover spouses if they have access to their own employer-sponsored coverage, up from 20 percent in 2012, and about 15 percent of companies charge spouses more for being on the plan.

"It’s never going to be a real popular move, especially for the plans that traditionally had richer benefit levels," Glus said of the reception spousal coverage cuts have faced. But, he said, in some situations it can be the lesser of two evils: "Either you can change the benefit levels for everyone in the plan, or you can look at some of these options that you hope only materially affect people who have access to other health care coverage."

Glus said the local findings seem roughly in line with national trends, with private companies tending to adopt the change earlier and public employers such as municipalities and school districts — which Central Pennsylvania has a lot of — tending to make the switch later.

"It’s such a large potential cost savings that everybody has to at least consider it when they’re looking at their benefit plans," Glus said.

Other findings of the survey:

• Premium costs are rising for employees and their families, a trend that has continued over the past four years.

• The most common change has been the plan deductible. In 2010, plans with $0 deductibles were the most common. Now, more than one-third of the companies have a deductible greater than $1,000, and more than half of the plans have deductibles of $500 or greater.

• In 2010, 19 percent of companies were not charging employees and 17 percent were not charging dependents. Now 11 percent do not require employees to pay any amount of plan premiums, and 5 percent do not require premium payments for dependents.

• The average percentage of premium employees pay now is 14 percent; for dependents, it's 21 percent.

Source: Central Penn Business Journal