While much of the attention in the current debate over health care concentrates on the impact of escalating health care costs on small businesses and the uninsured, new data from the Johns Hopkins Nonprofit Listening Post Project shows that health care costs are also producing a heretofore unnoticed crisis for the country's nonprofit organizations and the nearly 13 million workers they employ.
Nearly all, 98 percent, of the responding nonprofits offering health benefits indicated that they are concerned about their organization's health care costs, with 59 percent ranking health care costs as one of their organization's top challenges.
The impact is already being felt as organizations decide to stop offering, or reduce coverage of, health benefits; institute higher employee co-pays and shares of insurance costs; and in pressures to hold down wages, shift to part-time employees, and even reduce mission-critical services.
The nonprofit workforce is the fourth largest industry in the U.S. A labor of love for most, employees generally work on lower pay scales. Nonprofits take a greater hit because thier health benefit costs are unusually high since nonprofit employers have used decent benefits packages to attract and retain quality staff. With health benefit costs steadily rising those flush benefits packages are no longer possible for large numbers of nonprofits, according to the July 2009 survey conducted by Johns Hopkins researchers.
"The evidence is now in," noted Lester Salamon, report author and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. "Escalating health insurance costs are taking a dramatic toll on our nation's nonprofits and the devoted employees who work for them."
Other findings from the Johns Hopkins health benefits survey include:
- A striking 80 percent of the nonprofit respondents reported offering health insurance coverage for their employees. Nevertheless, the proportion not offering such coverage rose by 62 percent compared to the results from a comparable survey in 2004.
- Virtually all (99 percent) of the large nonprofits responding reported offering health benefits to employees but less than half (46 percent) of the smallest organizations did, and cost was a major factor at work.
- Nearly three out of every four nonprofits offering health benefits reported that their organization's total direct health insurance costs increased during the past year, and for over a third of the respondents the increase was over 10 percent�well above the national average of 5 percent per year.
Writer: Walaika Haskins
Source: Lester Salamon, Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies