Annual Survey of Employer Health Benefits, 2011

This annual survey provides a detailed picture of how employer health insurance coverage is changing over time in terms of availability, costs, and coverage for the 155 million Americans who rely on employer-sponsored health insurance.  Tracking how employer health insurance is changing provides critical information to a variety of audiences, including policymakers, researchers, employers, and the public.  The survey captures trends in employer health coverage, including changes in premiums, offer rates, eligibility and coverage, employee contributions, cost sharing policies, enrollment, prescription drug coverage, retiree health benefits, self-insurance, and wellness and disease management programs. NORC and its partners conducted telephone interviews with benefits managers through a nationally representative sample of over 2,000 American businesses with three or more workers. The project is an annual survey that began in the late 1980s, and has been sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation since 1999.  NORC takes a lead role in the survey and sampling design for this grant, along with data collection, database construction, analysis, and writing of the annual report and journal article.