Health Costs Jumping 18% For Small And Medium-Sized Businesses

Healthcare costs are rising nearly 20% for small-and mid-sized employers as employers grapple with a surge in inflation and medical expenses, in particular, a new report shows.

The analysis by Morgan Health, a business unit of the banking giant JP Morgan, released Wednesday shows how healthcare costs disproportionately impact smaller businesses. Several analyses out this year of health insurance for larger employers show their costs rising 8-10% this year.

“Nearly one-third (30%) of small and medium-sized businesses) with fewer than 50 employees report that health insurance costs are worsening their business situation, compared to 22% of larger small-and mid-sized businesses,” the Morgan Health report showed. “Smaller firms are less likely to take action to offset rising costs, often because they are not required to offer coverage and may drop it altogether.”

The Morgan Health survey of more than 1,000 U.S. small-and mid-sized businesses comes from a sample “evenly split between employers with 1–49 employees and those with 50–499 employees,” the company said. “Respondents held leadership, HR, finance or operations roles.”

Generally, health insurance tends to be lower cost for larger employers because there have more workers to spread costs across the pool of premium dollars companies and workers are paying. That money is used to pay medical claims of sick workers so health costs generally always hit smaller employers harder because the pool of premium dollars is smaller.

Here are other highlights of the report:

1. Small- and medium-sized businesses “struggle with unclear health insurance information, driving interest in digital and artificial intelligence tools. 89% would invest time to learn new tools if they made plan selection easier, and 75% believe AI-enabled tools could reduce reliance on outside experts.”
2. 71% of small-and mid-sized businesses “have taken steps in the past three years to respond to rising costs, such as implementing wellness programs, reducing spending elsewhere, or shifting costs to employees.”
3. More than half of small- and mid-sized businesses “are working with or considering brokers, but 20% have switched brokers and 53% have considered switching. A lack of transparency about broker compensation makes 51% of small and medium-sized businesses less confident in their decisions.”