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Health Care Costs See Steepest Jump In a Decade

Health Care Costs See Steepest Jump In a Decade

Researchers Find New Cause for Clogged Arteries

HEALTH CARE

by Marion Webb, Senior Staff Writer

Last year’s health care premiums saw the highest increase since 1990 as employers asked employees to share the burden of rising health care costs, according to a recent survey.

The trend of employers passing on the rising health care costs to workers in the form of higher co-payments for doctor visits and prescription drug costs, and offering fewer benefits altogether, is likely to continue.

That is according to the Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research and Educational Trust 2002 annual report. The report asked 3,262 random public and private employers queries such as how much their employees paid for health insurance, what types of coverage they provided, and how likely they were to raise employees’ premiums.

Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit research group, expects the health care situation to worsen.

“With health costs rising rapidly and no solution on the horizon, workers can expect to pay more and get less coverage,” Altman said. “And it will be even harder to tackle health care’s big ticket problems such as providing drug coverage for seniors and covering the uninsured.”

Monthly health premiums jumped 12.7 percent from the spring of 2001 to the spring of 2002, which marks the steepest rise since 1990.

Annual premiums for single employees averaged $3,060 compared to $7,954 for those with families.

Single employees contributed about $454, or $95 more than in 2001. Employees with families contributed $2,084 on average, or $283 more than last year.

Employees belonging to preferred-provider organization networks paid $276 in deductibles for 2002, up 37 percent from 2001.

For the first time in four years, more workers saw their health benefits cut rather than boosted , 17 percent of employers said they reduced employees’ coverage.

Slightly more than half of employers, or 53 percent, said health insurance remains the “greatest cost concern for the company.”

The majority of large companies with 200 or more employees said they were “very or somewhat” likely to raise premium costs next year, and about half said the same about asking employees’ to share prescription drug costs.

For the third year, employees had higher co-payments for both generic and brand name drugs. In 2002, co-payments for generic drugs rose to $9 from $8 in the previous two years. Co-pays for drugs that health plans prefer patients use because they are typically less costly rose to $17 from $15 in 2001 and $14 in 2000.

That compares to co-pays for drugs that are covered but are likely to be more expensive, rising to $26 from $20 in 2001 and $16 in 2000.

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New Findings On Clogged Arteries: UCSD researchers believe they have solved another piece of the puzzle involved in causing heart attacks and strokes.

Researchers said findings of a study suggest that a protein normally regarded as the immune system’s first-line defense against invading pathogens binds to oxidized “bad cholesterol” leading to inflammation and cholesterol accumulation.

The findings were published Sept. 9 in an online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Send health care news to

mwebb@sdbj.com.

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