Big Firms Expect 9% Rise in Health Care Cost

Well, it's not in double digits — yet...

A new survey by the National Business Group on Health — which includes huge employers like Microsoft — finds that they expect their health care costs to rise in 2011 by an average of almost 9 percent. For this year, they estimated it was about 7 percent.

And they'll be sharing the misery with their employees. Sixty-three percent plan to raise the portion of health insurance paid by their workers.

Desperately searching for some good news in the report, I found this: three-quarters of the employers now pay for wellness programs for obese or overweight workers. (Perhaps to counter the overeating brought on by the stress of paying insurance premiums??)