Many consumers have few choices for their health-care coverage, because employers offer few options. As HMOs continue to merge, there are even fewer choices this fall. But it is no easier to pick a good health-care plan now than it was in the early 1990s, when employers first began pushing their workers into managed care. In this report, we offer strategies for choosing a health-care plan and avoiding potential traps.
Some plans clearly are better than others, as our reader survey shows.
In short, health-care information today is as confusing as product information and labeling were some 30 years ago. Back then, consumers had no real information about the nutritional content of packaged food, the energy efficiency of their appliances, how their garments should be cleaned, or how much they were really paying for credit or for canned peaches. Eventually, public demand and government intervention brought sanity to the marketplace. The same thing must happen in health care. A wide gulf exists between the HMOs our readers like best, and the rest.