A New Healthcare Financing Solution

In this era of creative financing and cost management tools, many employers looking for new ways to help employees finance their health care expenses.

As an employer, would you like to give a good coverage, but the increased costs in recent years have been difficult to handle. A typical response to these increases can be to choose a high-deductible insurance product that lowers your costs. But there is a better solution.

Think HMO. That's right - health maintenance organizations. The HMOs today offer a whole new generation of healthcare financing tools that every employer should consider.

It is not your father's HMO.

You may have heard bad stories or had a rough experience in the past. However, times have changed. HMO plans now offer extensive provider networks, excellent coverage for preventive care, the ability to frequently change a primary care physician and the outstanding prescription drug coverage through a broad pharmacy network.

HMOs take the surprise out of the bill.

With most health insurance plans, an employee is responsible for a percentage of the cost of care, often 20 percent or 25 percent. This can add up very quickly and staff can not predict what their reward will be.

With an HMO structured co-pay plan, an employee knows up front the costs associated with most covered services. For example, an employee has a $ 20 copay for a primary care physician (PCP) visits, which will include all services in this visit. Each time the employees go to their PCP, they can expect to pay $ 20 - no surprises there.

Higher co-pays to offer savings.

The days of nickel sodas and 25-cent phone calls are long gone - and so is $ 5 and $ 10 co-pay plans. It is time to reconsider the value of co-pays. New HMO plans have higher co-pays, some up to $ 30 for a primary care visit and $ 50 for a specialist. But it covers all services during this visit. It is a valuable cost frontier in those days.

HMOs offer bold new design.

New HMO plans are fresh cost-sharing mechanisms, strategies, providing low employee out-of pocket expenditure in some areas while controlling your costs by increasing employee costs through deductibles for other areas.

In most pro-based plans, employees have a high deductible, which applies to all services. But with these new focus-deductible HMO plans, the deductible is limited to specific services such as hospital care or prescription drugs. After deduction is met, a co-pay also applies for this service.

In addition to these plans, employees continue to have a co-pay instead of a deductible for heavily used areas such as doctor or specialist visits.

HMOs are the FSA and HRA compatible.

Many HMO plans can be used with flexible spending and health reimbursement accounts, so the employees to decide how some of their healthcare dollars are spent. Many carriers are also developing health spending account-compatible HMO plans.

HMOs offer more than insurance.

Today's HMO plans offer health improvement programs such as discounted fitness club memberships and value added options to allow employees to take responsibility for their own health.

There are two primary reasons to turn today's HMO - savings for you and savings for your employees. Rediscover today's HMO - you will be satisfied with what you find.