Chris and Becky own a 20-year-old promotional marketing business. "We pride ourselves on taking care of our employees." Offering health coverage helps them to attract and retain good young talent, but the coverage has gotten grossly expensive and is everchanging.

Due to the rise in cost of health care in past years, they are on the cusp of having to drop their employees' coverage. The past few years, Chris has seen a 10-15% increase per year in the premiums they pay. The cost of healthcare is one of the company's top 3 expenses, on par with payroll and rent. As business is 35-40% down (because of the national economic downturn), they had to lay off about half of their staff. This causes health insurance enrollment to drop and probably a rate increase in December. "It could be really tough." They have had to take pay cuts to make payroll. "We have long-tenured employees who have been with us for 15-20 years. They are like family. Our employees depend on us for this coverage. We'd like to see an incentive to provide care, through breaks from the government and also control the prices."

Right now, individual employees can have PPO coverage for $50 per month and the company pays the rest of the $300 premium. Individuals have a $2,000 deductible. If the employee wants family coverage, they have to pay for the entire product, including the $4,000 deductible.They experimented briefly with an HSA plan, which did not work at all. It costed much more for less care and had a terrible drug benefit. Chris has had 2 or 3 employees with spouses who work at larger companies. These companies would not insure employees whose spouses' employers offered family coverage. Chris made the comment that these larger companies could probably afford to insure these workers better than he could.