Fewer Trade Groups and Association offer Health Insurance.

In an alarming trend fewer and fewer trade groups or business associations are offering health insurance to their memberships. There was a time when self employed individuals and those that otherwise did not have access to affordable health benefits from their employers sought membership in a group to obtain low-cost health benefits.

But such options are dwindling. According to a spokesman for The American Society of Association Executives, today less than 25% of trade groups and associations offer affordable health coverage as a benefit of membership. Fifteen to twenty years ago, it was about 60-70%. This creates kind of a downward spiral effect. It makes it harder for associations to attract and keep new members, because they no longer can offer health benefits, and it is that very lack of young and healthy members, that are forcing most associations to have to stop providing health coverage to the remaining members.

Case in point, recently Marcy Garber a self-employed realtor received a letter that her Blue Shield Health Insurance policy had been canceled. She had purchased the policy as part of the Group Plan through the California Association of Realtors. She at first thought she may have missed a premium; she later came to find out that Blue Shield of California dropped the group because they could no longer comply with having the contracted amount of policy holders, in this case 75.

This is illustrative of the problems facing trade groups, and is a bit of unexpected fallout of individual and private health insurance policies coming down in price due to consumer demand. With many young and healthy individuals finding that in many States individual health insurance polices can actually cost less than group plans, they are fleeing such groups, leaving them with a pool of high risk individuals that cannot keep the group viable. The result is either very high rates or disappearance of the group entirely.

With the availability of such groups shrinking, for those who are self employed, or working for the growing number of companies that do not provide benefits, and cannot afford to purchase low-cost individual health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, options are diminishing. Such is Marcy’s case. She is a two-time breast cancer survivor.

Still she is optimistic, having beaten breast cancer on more than one occasion she knows she will find insurance somewhere, she just is unclear how much she will have to pay, or how she will pay for it. Says Marcy “"I'm going to have to do whatever it takes till I reach the Medicare age, and I haven't found that exact solution yet, but I'm looking every day." As are millions of other American just like her.