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Employers remain the main source of health insurance in the United States, covering about 153 million people. But premiums and deductibles are pushing employer-based coverage increasingly out of reach, according to a new analysis released Wednesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which conducts a survey of employers every year. The average premium paid by the employer and the employee for a family plan now tops $20,000 a year, with the worker contributing about $6,000, according to the survey. More than a quarter of all covered workers and nearly half of those working for small businesses face an annual deductible of $2,000 or more. (Abelson, 9/25)

The average total cost of employer-provided health coverage passed $20,000 for a family plan this year, according to a new survey, a landmark that will likely resonate politically as health care has become an early focus of the presidential campaign. ... “It’s a milestone,” said Drew Altman, chief executive of the foundation. “It’s the cost of buying an economy car, just buying it every year.” Employees’ costs rose at an even faster clip—the average annual amount workers paid toward premiums for the family plans grew 8%, to $6,015 this year. (Wilde Mathews, 9/25)

Kaiser Health News: As Health Care Costs Rise, Workers At Low-Wage Firms May Pay A Larger Share

Fewer workers at companies with large numbers of lower-wage workers were eligible for coverage in the first place, the survey found. Overall, 57% of companies offer health insurance to their workers. But only two-thirds of workers at lower-wage firms that offered coverage were eligible for it, compared with 81% of workers at other firms, according to the survey. (Andrews, 9/25)

The seemingly inexorable rise of costs has led to deep frustration with U.S. health care, prompting questions about whether a system where coverage is tied to a job can survive. As premiums and deductibles have increased in the last two decades, the percentage of workers covered has slipped as employers dropped coverage and some workers chose not to enroll. Fewer Americans under 65 had employer coverage in 2017 than in 1999, according to a separate Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of federal data. (Tozzi, 9/25)

Most people in the United States—about 153 million—get their health insurance through their jobs. Employer-sponsored coverage in the past has been left out of national conversations about health insurance affordability, even though it has seen enormous growth in costs over the last decade. More recently, though, experts have suggested that the struggle among workers to afford employer health coverage could be fueling interest in Medicare-For-All proposals that eliminate job-based coverage. (Livingston, 9/25)

Recent polling that shows 40% of nonelderly adults with employer-based coverage said that they or a family member had difficulty affording health insurance or health care, or had trouble paying medical bills, the Kaiser Family Foundation researchers noted. Roughly one in two surveyed said they or a family member had skipped or postponed care or medications in the past 12 months due to costs. (Snowbeck, 9/25)

More than a quarter (28%) of all covered workers, including nearly half of those at small employers with fewer than 200 employees, are now in plans with a deductible of at least $2,000, almost four times the share who faced such deductibles in 2009. One in eight now face deductibles of at least $3,000. (Miller, 9/25)