Minding Your Business: Tough Pill to Swallow
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: "Minding Your Business" right now Andy Serwer is checking in right now. If you get your health care through your company, many of us do that, important news today. Drew has that now. What are you finding out? Good morning.</s>ANDY SERWER, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: Well, Bill, good morning to you. Some good news, bad news for the U.S. economy. Companies paying a little bit less than anticipated for health care costs this year, but the bad news is guess what? They've shifted it to the employees. Why am I not surprised by this? Let's take a look at the numbers here from Mercer Consulting. You can see here, 2003 in the middle, that's the important one, health care cost per employee up only 10 percent. That's still a lot, but less than the previous year -- you can see that. But how's that being paid for? Well, it has been shifted to the workers, and we can see here that the employees are paying at a large firm about $224. Small firms, people are paying even more, Bill. And what's happening here is that the costs are going up on average -- there's a new story in The Wall Street Journal" suggesting today -- at least 15 percent per year in terms of employees picking up additional monies. That California supermarket strike this year, that was all about health care costs going up. Lucent seeing 50 percent increases for their retirees' health care costs, $850 million they're saying is what costs. That's 10 percent of their annual sales. That's health care costs just for their retirees --a huge problem that continues to vex companies.</s>HEMMER: Yes, a relevant story with Medicare being signed up today at the White House.</s>SERWER: Absolutely.</s>HEMMER: A quick check of the markets. Last week, we went where?</s>SERWER: Last week...</s>HEMMER: Which may tell us where we go today.</s>SERWER: Well, that's right. Last week, we were up on the Dow and down on the Nasdaq. Let's check it out. Up about 80 points there, that's that .8 percent. And we continue to head towards the end of the year well into the black. The Dow only 15 percent off of it's all-time high of 11722, reached on January 14, 2000. The Nasdaq still well below that 5048 number in March of '01. A lot of IPOs -- initial public offerings -- expected this month. Futures are down right now. Christmas sales impacted a little bit by the big winter storm. But I heard the malls were still very crowded.</s>HEMMER: Wow!</s>SERWER: People using those SUVs to get out.</s>HEMMER: That's true. The IPOs are coming back into fashion.</s>SERWER: Yes.</s>HEMMER: Thank you, Andy. See you next hour.</s>SERWER: OK, Bill. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com.