However many employers are now capping the amount they'll pay for their retirees' health insurance. Find out whether there is such a cap and how it will affect future health care costs. But there can be significant restrictions on access to certain medical services, including specialists and physicians who are not on the HMO's roll. Be prepared for a change. An HMO that is a good deal today may be a poor one in a few months.
Benefits can and do disappear.
Consumer Reports found huge price differences among companies offering the same plan in a particular area. Among the most significant are the options that attract healthy beneficiaries away from Medicare by offering prescription-drug benefits and other special services not covered by Medicare so only the sickest people will remain in the program. Historically, by spreading insurance risk among the health and the seriously ill, it was possible to insure everybody. If healthy people leave Medicare to join other plans and if the sickest people continue to generate 75 percent of Medicare's expenditures, as they do now, the program will be too costly for the government to maintain. The premiums paid by healthy people who leave will go to pay insurance companies, doctors, and hospital organizations instead of subsidizing care for the sick.