Survey: Workers want healthcare from jobs

WASHINGTON, April 12 (UPI) -- U.S. businesses and workers may not be ready to sound the death knell for employer-sponsored health insurance, a new employer/employee poll suggests.

Most workers like getting health benefits from work, according to a survey released Thursday. Meanwhile -- despite conventional wisdom -- many employers say they like offering it.

"Employees value their health benefits now more than ever, and they should," said Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, a group of 266 large U.S. companies, which surveyed 1,619 workers at firms with 2,500 or more employees.

Two out of three workers surveyed rate their health plan as "excellent" or "very good," and an even greater percentage say it is their most important benefit.

A growing chorus of academics, politicians and even some employers and labor unions say the employer-based system of health insurance is on its way out. President Bush's recently proposed healthcare reforms would use tax code changes to dismantle it by design.

Meanwhile, businesses and healthcare cost gurus are pushing health savings accounts and other consumer-directed products that ask consumers to track and control their own healthcare saving and spending.

But, according to the survey, employees have little desire to worry about choosing their own plan or administering it. Instead, they prefer the security of work-based health plans with fairly comprehensive benefits that involve little active participation on their part.

More than 80 percent of employees said they like their benefits so much they would be willing to accept reductions in pay or retirement benefits to keep their health coverage.

Most of the respondents who said they did not like their employer coverage said they do not want to purchase insurance on their own, even if they are essentially given the money to do so.

"Healthcare reform that would include moving employees to the individual market would not be popular with these respondents," Darling said. "Any suggested changes will be most successful if they minimize impact on employees' comfort level."

And many large employers, aware of employee sentiments, see health plans as a valuable tool for attracting and retaining high-quality employees in the current, relatively tight labor market.

"When you're talking about the (employee) who could identify the next hit for HBO, you're not focused on getting out of the health insurance industry," said Harry Spencer, board chairman of the National Business Group on Health and vice president for global benefits at Time Warner.

Even in Europe where there is universal public healthcare, he said, many firms offer supplemental insurance to lure in top-notch employees.

And that way of thinking is not limited to employers with highly skilled or specialized work forces, said Joseph Antos, a health economist at the American Enterprise Institute.

"What every employer -- whether it's a big firm or a five-person auto-mechanic shop -- has to worry about is finding good people and then retaining them," Antos told United Press International.

"Health benefits in particular have always been an important tool in trying to distinguish yourself from competitors in the labor market."

But even employee and employer wishes, however, cannot erase the reality of rising healthcare costs, Antos said.

"Most employers realize health benefits are a two-edged sword. They're important for recruitment ... but cost a tremendous amount of money."

The picture is also different for firms in sectors with less profit per employee or small businesses, which are dropping their health coverage at three times the rate of larger firms, said Brian Klepper, director of the Center for Practical Health Reform, a Florida-based non-partisan group.

"They just can't keep up," Klepper told UPI.

"From an economic perspective, business leaders see this as a tremendous drain on the bottom line," he said. "No matter how fast they grow, healthcare costs grow faster.

"American employees who have coverage really appreciate the fact they have coverage and would very much like to hold on to it. The question is, can they?"