A few days after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that Medicare premium rates would remain stable throughout the next year for 95 percent of the nation’s elderly, a study by Lincolnshire-based Hewitt Associates estimates that US workers with job-based health insurance can expect health-care coverage to rise nearly 9 percent in 2009, to $3,826 a year from $3,513 in 2008.

Employees on average will contribute $1,946 or 22 percent, toward health-insurance premiums in 2009, compared with $1,806, or 21.6 percent now. Moreover, they will likely face steeper out-of-pocket costs – through higher copays, annual deductibles and co-insurance – of $1,880 next year, compared with $1,707 now. According to the report, employees with family coverage would tend to pay more and workers with single coverage would tend to pay less.

Meanwhile, companies will see their health-insurance costs rise 6.4 percent, to an annual tab of $8,863 per employee.
 
“People are getting hit from all over the place. Companies are hunkering down through this,” Craig Dolezal, principal in Hewitt’s health-management practice, said.

The findings were based on data derived from the Hewitt Health Value Initiative, a cost and performance analysis database of more than 1,800 health plans throughout the US including more than 300 major employers and more than 13 million health-plan participants.