Universal coverage too high at any price for some employers

Wall Street Journal (blog), October 22, 2008

One of the biggest question in the national debate over health reform is how, or whether, to get more employers to provide a company health plan, according to this blog posting in the Wall Street Journal. But a new survey from the consulting group Mercer finds that the majority of employers that do not offer health benefits say they would not pay anything or could not pay more than $50 a month to cover an employee. The findings, says Linda Havlin, a Mercer partner, suggest "how tough it's going to be to ask very small employers to voluntarily take on the expense of providing health coverage."