Are Employer-Sponsored Health Benefits Eroding?

The 2007 Employee Benefit News/Forrester Research Benefits Decisions' Impact Study of more than 900 benefits professionals examines employers' overall benefits strategies. One of the top concerns among benefits managers is healthcare. Although health insurance premium increases continued to slow this year, they still outpace inflation and wages. Faced with this challenge, employers of all sizes continue to squeeze more savings out of their cost containment strategies. This, in turn, is contributing to a slow erosion of benefits, continued increases in employee cost sharing, and a steady migration toward account-based benefits structures. Product management professionals at health insurers need to respond to employers' needs with more flexibility in plan design, preventive health incentives, and value-added services that ease members' pain.