(Cleveland Plain Dealer) Small companies with a worker or two who have the misfortune to require serious medical care know what happens at insurance-renewal time. Their premiums don’t just rise. They leap.
Small employers don’t have that happen as often when they have young, healthy workforces.
This is an old reality in the health insurance field, which until now correlated a policy’s price with a client’s risk and claims experience. Was an employee hospitalized recently? Is he at risk of cancer? The employer’s premiums were almost sure to spike.
The Affordable Care Act is about to upend these old insurance pricing models, especially for companies with 50 or fewer employees. Yet until things stabilize, this is going to mean a lot of price hikes for small businesses, according to Ohio health insurance administrators, brokers and even advocates of the health care law commonly called Obamacare.