Employers play a significant role in health insurance coverage - providing health benefits to three in five non-elderly Americans ¹⁴ - so their attitudes, knowledge, and experiences are important factors in health policy discussions.

This year's survey asked employers a number of questions about their responses to rising health insurance premiums, including cost sharing decisions and opinions about the effectiveness of various approaches to reduce premiums in the future. Firms generally express skepticism that any of the currently available cost containment strategies will dramatically reduce costs. Perhaps as a result, many firms project that they are likely to continue raising workers' share of costs next year.

• To get a sense of whether firms have attempted to use purchas-ing power to reduce their premiums, firms were asked whether they shopped for a new health plan in the last year and whether they had switched type of health plans or insurance carriers. Overall, 62% of firms said they had shopped for new plans. Of these, one third (or 20% of all firms) said they switched health plan types or carriers in the past year (Exhibit 12.1).
  
• • Jumbo firms (5,000 or more workers) were much less likely to shop for new health plans (37%); however, among firms that shopped for new health plans, jumbo firms were most likely to report switching carriers or plan type (61%).
  • State and local governments and firms with union workers were far less likely to report shopping for new plans (37% and 32%, respectively) than all firms, but were just as likely to switch carriers or plan types among those who said they looked for a new plan.

[14] Urban Institute and Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured estimates based on the March 2001 Current Population Surveys.