California's Employer-Provided Market
Employer-provided coverage is often referred to as group health insurance. When group health insurance is an employee benefit, the employer usually pays a portion or all of the premiums.
This means the consumer's costs for health insurance premiums will be lower than it would be if the consumer paid the entire premium alone.
Three in five Californians get their health insurance through their employers.
54.7 percent of the 25.2 million Californians who have health care coverage receive their health insurance via employers or group-based coverage plans, such as those offered by CAHP member plans.
Some employers allow the consumer to choose between several plans, while others offer only one plan.
Under employer-sponsored health coverage, the typical enrollee pays about 1.5 percent of annual income.
Employer premium contributions as a share of payroll vary - ranging from less than 4 percent to more than 15 percent.
Nearly two-thirds of California businesses offer health insurance to at least some workers as a benefit of employment.
These businesses account for 89 percent of California workers.
Expanding employer-sponsored coverage to all full-time workers in California, as has been proposed on several occasions in the past five years, would produce new costs for more than half of businesses.
Those costs would be more than 5 percent of current payroll costs for almost 25 percent of businesses.
Source: Employer-Based Insurance: Coverage and Cost, June 2006, California HealthCare Foundation.
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