Healthcare costs biting into income

Washington -- Rising healthcare costs are one reason U.S. wages have lost 2.6 percent a year since 2000, The New York Times reported Monday.

Family healthcare premiums have escalated 78 percent since 2001, while median incomes have fallen nearly $1,000 behind every year, when accounting for inflation, the report said.

Forty-seven million U.S. residents are uninsured. On the job, 25 percent of workers who make $15 an hour or less have no access to healthcare benefits, the report said. In comparison, 10 percent of those who make $15 an hour or more have no healthcare offered by their employer.

The Kaiser Family Foundation reported that the cost of family coverage averaged $12,106 in 2007, with an average employee contribution of $3,281 a year.

"It is clear that benefits have been the biggest issue on collective bargaining tables and in company compensation calculations," Thomas A. Kochan, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Times.

Employees rank healthcare as a critical issue, as do employers. In a national survey taken in 2007, 90 percent of manufacturers named healthcare costs as a bigger worry than government regulation, competition from foreign companies or qualified workers.

Copyright 2008 by United Press International.