PhillyDeals: Survey: Employers brace for 9% rise in health-insurance costs

U.S. employers expect health-insurance costs to rise an average 9 percent next year, up from 7 percent in 2010, according to a survey by the National Business Group on Health in Washington of 75 big corporations.

The new U.S. health-care law is forcing some employers to add new coverage. Seven of 10 large companies will have to remove limits on lifetime-insurance spending per employee. Thirteen percent of them will have to start covering employees' children, even those with expensive preexisting conditions.

A majority of employers plan to boost the premiums that employees pay, and nearly half of the companies intend to raise employee co-pays and deductibles.

But "plan-design and cost-shifting will only go so far," says Joe DiBella, executive vice president at business and government insurance agency Conner Strong Cos. Inc., of Marlton, who sent me the report. DiBella said more employers were trying to impose "incentives and rewards" for quitting smoking, eating more healthfully, and needing less medical care.

'Pay-for-delay' deals

Like when the government pays farmers not to plant crops.

Carrier's been following litigation over drugmaker Bayer's past payments, of nearly $400 million, to generic drugmakers so they wouldn't make cheap antibiotics similar to its brand-name Cipro.

The New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second District had invited drug consumers to challenge past rulings that protect paid-for drug monopolies - but Wednesday, it issued a ruling that stopped that litigation.

Carrier says the bipartisan Hatch-Waxman Act, which was supposed to promote cheap generic drugs, "has been stymied by these pay-for-delay agreements."

But now, unless Congress acts, Carrier said, "the increased prescription drug prices consumers have paid are more likely to continue."

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