Small Business Strategies for Managing Rising Health-Care Costs Ballooning premiums and shifting government regulations can make dealing with employee health insurance a nightmare, here's how to cope.

Thanks to the congressional debate over healthcare reform and the upcoming presidential election, the future of health benefits for small businesses is uncertain. Experts predict that a verdict won't be clear until the latter half of 2013.

But you can't afford to put things on hold until then. Health insurance costs continue to snowball. In 2011, the average annual premium for an employer-sponsored health plan was $5,429 per worker--an 8 percent increase over 2010, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2011 Employer Health Benefits Survey. To compensate, more small businesses are passing these costs on to their employees.