On health care, employers are eyeing a tumultuous year ahead and will be looking to Capitol Hill for help.
in September, seven in 10 employers expect moderate to significant increases in the cost of health benefits over the next three years."Employers are fed up, as they should be. They're footing the bill, along with Medicare and Medicaid, for everything," said Brian Miller, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and hospitalist at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
"Everyone is angry about drug costs. Well, yes. But that's 12% of costs," he said. "Hospitals and physician practices are 51% of health care expenditures ... We actually haven't really looked at that."Employers have been able to shift some of the cost burden to workers through premium increases or high-deductible plans. But the tight labor market could provide an argument against that in the next two years.
"It's put a lot more pressure on employers because employers are the delivery mechanisms of health care," Sun said. "They had to deal with COVID. Then they had to deal with the Great Resignation. Then they had to deal with the recession and are laying people off. And now they have to plug this other gap.
Antitrust regulation could focus more on provider consolidation, and there could be more efforts focused on drug price transparency and the role of pharmacy benefit managers, per theOne health cost issue facing longer odds is paid family leave, which was dropped during talks on the Build Back Better package but still could be revived in the run-up to the 2024 presidential race.
"Right now the parties are pretty far apart," said Zach Baron, a health policy and law expert at Georgetown University. But he said both sides could see it in their interest to score some narrower policy wins addressing health costs to appeal to independent voters.In the meantime, employers are watching the lame-duck session to see how accommodating lawmakers might be.
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