health insurance

Businesses struggling with health insurance

(SIGN ON SAN DIEGO) - About a week before President Barack Obama’s summit on health care in Washington, D.C., Robert Metz, the owner of San Diego’s Voice and Video Sales, was sorting through his mail when he noticed a letter from his health insurer, Anthem Blue Cross of California.

Metz was prepared for bad news. Blue Cross had already fallen into the public spotlight by announcing its intention to raise standard policies by as much as 39 percent. But the jump in Metz’s bill was far beyond what he imagined. His premiums jumped not 38 but 58 percent, from an annual cost of $14,148 to $22,404.

“And to add to this insult,” he said, “they raised the annual out-of-pocket deductible from $3,000 to $4,500,” which means that unless one of his employees uses more than $4,500 in health care, he or she will never see the benefit of all those insurance payments. Since enrolling in the plan last April 1, they haven’t even crossed the $3,000 mark.

With that kind of rate hike and in this kind of economy — where profit margins for retailers are already razor-thin — Metz fears that he won’t be able to keep providing insurance for his workers. And with the price tag on individual insurance coverage so high, that means his employees might join the burgeoning ranks of the uninsured.

“All my employees are in good health, and the reason we took such a high deductible is that we wanted to keep the price of the premium down,” he said. “Blue Cross didn’t give us any rationale for why they were doing it. And I can’t imagine any justification for that kind of increase. The insurance companies are just raking people over.”

It’s a common problem. Roughly 47 percent of small businesses in California say they cannot provide coverage for their workers, according to a poll last year by the Small Business Majority, a Sausalito business group pushing for health care reform. Among the businesses that do provide insurance, 70 percent say they are currently struggling to make the payments. Among self-employed entrepreneurs, 28 percent nationwide cannot afford insurance, the group found.

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