Health Care Reform: What it Means for Nonprofits
America’s health insurance crisis has become a crisis of survival for America’s nonprofit organizations. Organizations that should be focused on relieving poverty, promoting self-sufficiency, educating children, helping families, and providing elderly care are instead being consumed with worries about how they will continue to maintain their workforce in the face of steadily escalating health benefit costs. Their only option—cutting benefits and shifting more of the costs to their workers—is itself self-defeating, significantly reducing one of the few tangible advantages that employment in the nonprofit sector brings with it and penalizing workers at precisely the time that new demands are being placed upon them.
Excerpted from
“Health Care and Nonprofits: The Hidden Dimension of America’s Health Care Crisis”
Center for Civil Society Studies, Johns Hopkins University
September 2, 2009
Nonprofits across the country are struggling to keep up with rising costs of employee healthcare coverage, according to a study published last week by the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University. In late July and August 2009, 412 nonprofit executives participated in the University’s survey; nearly all of the respondents (98 percent) said they were concerned about their organization’s health care costs and an alarming 59 percent of those participants ranked health care costs as one of their organization’s top challenges.
As the Obama administration battles to reform the current health care system to be accessible for all Americans, including a proposal for tax-breaks to small private business owners, those working in the nonprofit world may be wondering: what about us?
Hopefully we will hear the answer to this question tonight during President Obama’s speech to the Joint Session of Congress.
Check out the full report at: http://www.ccss.jhu.edu/index.php?section=content&view=16&sub=104&tri=94
Has your organization employed any creative strategies to deal with the challenge of rising health care costs? Please share!
Executive Alliance, on behalf of the northwest non-profit community, has been studying the same issue. Its Public Policy Committee has sought to make congressional members aware of the oversight in proposing tax credits for small business that have no meaning or value for non-profits. It remains to be seen whether Congress recognises the importance of non-profits to the economy.
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