Workers to foot more benefit bills

LYNDHURST, N.J. More than a third of the companies in a surveysaid they planned to make workers pay more for health benefits tohelp contain rising costs.

The survey, taken at the beginning of the year, said 39 percentof the respondents would increase or introduce employee healthcontributions in 1991. Only 13 percent took those actions in 1990,according to the survey of 484 corporations by the AlexanderConsulting Group of Lyndhurst.

The companies are clients of Alexander Consulting, which sentout 3,400 questionnaires.

The companies said total benefit costs - health, retirement,paid time off and government payments - average more than 40 percentof payroll, or about $14,061 per employee. On average, companies pay$11,059 of the cost and employees pay $3,002, the survey said.

Employees are paying about 19 percent of the total cost ofmedical plans. The questionnaire did not ask companies how much morethey expected employees to contribute.

Don Hasbargen of the Chicago-based consulting group Hewitt andAssociates, which also conducts similar surveys, called the increasein employee contributions a short-term solution to rising costs.

He said the easiest way to manage higher costs in a tougheconomy is to share them.

The Alexander survey found health maintenance organizations tobe popular, although some companies do not believe they always savemoney.

HMOs charge companies a fixed rate to provide comprehensivemedical care. Patients need only pay a nominal fee to cover mostmedical procedures.

"While 66 percent of the respondents offer employer HMOs,one-third of these do not believe the HMO programs providecost-saving and another 20 percent are undecided," said Ed Freedmanof Alexander Consulting. "For such a pervasive health-care option,these are disturbing results."

Mary-Helen McMahon, a health care specialist at Alexander, saidmost HMOs have not yet found a way to manage their networks ofdoctors and services cost-effectively. Among the companies surveyed,cost management plans are a popular method for controlling healthplan costs - 84 percent use some type of the plans.