Employer Choices and HMOs

* HMO malaise is one issue; another is employer plan choice.

During stronger economies, fringe benefit packages needed to be competitive to attract and hold quality employees. Such was the case during the aerospace / defense good times.

Now things are improving again, yet employers have retrogressed and continue to choose the cheapest plans, citing only cost-saving benefit.

What about the employees? Are they getting health plan coverage improvement anywhere near proportional to their employers’ bottom-line improvement?

Cheap, employee-hostile plans are the new standard, unlikely to see any indemnity of other liberalized health plan challenge. Sorry about that.

WILLIAM A. SPINDELL

West Hills