Average costs for U.S. employers that pay for their employees' health care will increase 6.5 percent to more than $13,800 per employee in 2023, according to Aon.
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This projection is more than double the 3 percent increase to health care budgets which employers experienced from 2021 to 2022; but is significantly below the 9.1 inflation figure reported through the Consumer Price Index.
On average, the budgeted health care costs for clients is $13,020 per employee in 2022. The analysis uses the firm's Health Value Initiative database, which captures information for nearly 700 U.S. employers representing approximately 5.6 million employees.
Medical claims were suppressed for most employers during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which time much care was postponed or skipped during quarantines. Employers have seen the medical claims experience return to more typical levels of growth and anticipate inflationary cost pressures in the coming year.
Price increases driven by economic inflation typically are slow to appear in medical trends due to the multi-year nature of the typical provider contract, but will become apparent over the coming year, Ashford added. Other contributing factors adding pressure on health care trends are new technologies, severity of catastrophic claims, blockbuster drugs and increasing share of specialty drugs.
In terms of 2022 health plans, employer costs increased 3.7 percent, while employee premiums from pay checks were slated to be a more modest 0.6 percent increase from 2021, according to the firm's analysis.
Plan costs represent the employer's and employee's combined premiums for medical and prescription drug costs but exclude employee out-of-pocket payments such as deductibles, co-pays and co-insurance.
On average, employers subsidize about 81 percent of the plan cost, while employees pay the remainder.
Employees in 2022 are contributing about $4,412 for health care coverage this year, of which $2,520 is paid in the form of premiums from paychecks and $1,892 is paid through plan design features such as deductibles, co-pays and co-insurance, according to the firm's analysis.
Faced with the constant, upward pressure from health care trends each year, employers are exploring new solutions to trim their health care costs. One worthwhile approach is to address the high costs associated with patients with chronic and complex health care conditions. ■