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Insurance > Health Insurance
Employers to offer health plans to millions of uninsured workers
JOSHUA FREED, AP Business Writer. Associated Press.
Copyright Associated Press
Part-time workers, contractors, and early retirees who usually wouldn't qualify for corporate health insurance could get coverage under a plan announced Thursday by a consortium of dozens of large companies.
The HR Policy Association said about 25 companies, including Ford Motor Co., International Business Machines Corp., and Sears Roebuck and Co. planned to offer the coverage.
Workers would be offered a choice of six levels of benefits, from a $4.41-a-month discount card to full insurance policies. UnitedHealth Group Inc. is providing four of the plans and said it expects to begin enrolling customers on Sept. 1.
Companies often pay for much of full-time workers' coverage. They can be reluctant to add part-time workers or contractors because of the expense. The new insurance announced Thursday is scaled-down and won't be subsidized by the companies, said Jeff McGuiness, the consortium's executive director.
McGuiness said the companies are hoping to enroll several hundred thousand of the 3 million people eligible.
Two of the health plans are major-medical policies with high deductibles _ $2,000 for a single in one, and $1,100 in the other. One of the other plans covers 80 percent of the cost of an office visit, leaving the patient to pay the rest.
The companies hope that as consumers begin writing health care checks they will also put pressure on health providers to lower costs, said Greg A. Lee, vice president for human resources at Sears and chairman of the coalition that came up with the insurance plan.
Lee called rising costs "a health care crisis."
"This is just a start. This is not a panacea," he said.
Lee said about 100,000 part-time Sears workers will be offered the coverage.
UnitedHealth Group of Minnetonka, Minn. will offer the four cheapest plans, with Humana Inc. and Cigna Corp. handling the major- medical policies.
The premiums will vary. A 28-year-old man in Phoenix would pay about $100 a month for coverage of scheduled inpatient and outpatient visits and hospitalization, according to an example given by the coalition. A 38-year-old woman in Chicago would pay $166.59 a month for the same insurance if she included maternity coverage, or $395 a month for a major medical policy.
UnitedHealth spokesman Mark Lindsay said the company is offering the coverage to shrink the number of uninsured, estimated at 45 million.
"We're not doing it to be profitable. We're doing because we realize that having 45 million people uninsured is terrible for the health care system. Period."
The coverage will be good for workers because it will let them buy insurance more cheaply than they could get on their own, said Paul Ginsburg president of the nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change.
"Is this the solution to the problem of the uninsured? Of course not," Ginsburg said. "It's not even a solution for the people eligible for this, because a lot of them just won't have the money."
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
Companies: Sears Roebuck & Co(Ticker:S, NAICS: 523120, 454110, 452110, Duns:00-162-9955 ) , UnitedHealth Group (NAICS: 524114, Sic:6324 )
Dateline: Undated
Text Word Count 481
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• Insurance > Health Insurance Archive
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