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Goodwin now pays about $10,000 a month, and to keep his costs down he increased his employees' deductible this year to $500 from $250 and cut his coverage for employee dependents in half.
"I could get it cheaper if I wanted it, but you get what you pay for," Goodwin said.
As the debate about health care goes on, Goodwin said he opposes what the Obama administration and Congress have proposed, particularly a government-run public option, which he fears businesses could be asked to subsidize.
"It ain't the government's business," Goodwin said. "They don't need to be running a car company, and they sure don't need to be running health care."
If there's a way to keep costs down without the government getting involved, however, Goodwin said he's all for it.
Dallas Salisbury, the president and chief executive of the Employee Benefits Research Institute, said Goodwin's comments are typical of surveys of business owners, who're mostly Republican or Libertarian and are likely to oppose most forms of government intervention.
Without state or local level regulation, however, Salisbury said insurance companies would withhold coverage from people with pre-existing conditions and try to "cherry pick," or insure only healthy people.
Resolving the cost, coverage and quality issues surrounding the health care debate will always be difficult as long as consumers want access to everything, "but they assume that everybody else is getting a lot of services that they really don't need. That has been, for at least 60 years, the dilemma of modern health care," Salisbury said.
Other key findings from the survey:
_ Twenty-two percent of workers now pay at least $1,000 out of their own pocket for single coverage before their insurance kicks in. That's up from 18 percent last year, according to the survey of more than 2,000 public and private employers.
_ The average annual deductible for single coverage in an HMO increased to $699 this year from $503 in 2008. For family coverage in an HMO, the average deductible jumped to $1,524 from $1,053.
(The McClatchy Washington Bureau works in partnership with Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service that provides coverage of the nation's health care debate and is part of the Kaiser Family Foundation. The Kaiser foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization that isn't affiliated with Kaiser Permanente, helped conduct this survey.)
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The full report and summary of survey findings
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