Skip to content

Industry News

Print

Kaiser Family Foundation Releases 2019 Employer Health Benefits Survey

On September 25, 2019, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) released its survey report, 2019 Employer Health Benefits Survey.  The survey provides detailed information regarding health insurance premiums, employer and employee contributions, employee cost-sharing, wellness programs and other topics.

Some of the key findings include:

  • Employer-sponsored health insurance covers about 153 million of the non-elderly population in the U.S.  Approximately 57% of all employers offer health care benefits to at least some workers, and 61% of workers are covered.  All of these percentages are similar to 2018.
  • For employer-sponsored family coverage, annual premiums averaged $20,576 in 2019, up 5% from 2018.  Workers paid an average of $6,015 towards family coverage.
  • For employer-sponsored single coverage, annual premiums averaged $7,188 in 2019, up 4% from 2018.  Workers paid an average of $1,242 towards single coverage.
  • With regard to employee cost-sharing for health care, about 82% of all covered workers faced a general annual deductible, which averaged $1,655 for single coverage in 2019.  Workers in small firms (i.e., with 3 to 199 employees) were more likely to have larger deductibles, which averaged $2,271 as compared with $1,412 in large firms (with 200 or more employees).
  • Almost all large firms and many small firms have health and wellness programs that help workers identify health issues and manage chronic conditions (i.e., health risk assessments, biometric screenings and health promotion programs).

The report concludes, “the national debate about expanding Medicare or creating public programs options provides an opportunity to step back and evaluate how well employer-based coverage is doing in achieving national goals relating to costs and affordability.  In doing so, it will be important to look past averages and examine how well the market serves the many different types of employers and working families in the many different circumstances that they face.”

KFF also updated an interactive graphing tool to examine trends in premiums and worker contributions among workers covered by employer-sponsored coverage at different types of firms.  The tool uses a web-based interface to the underlying Kaiser/HRET data from the Employer Health Benefits Surveys from 1999-2019.

The survey report and interactive graphic are available here.