California HMOs' profits soaring--good article

[Kavex]

Article link here (http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:a7nku72A0GAC:famulus.msnbc.com/famuluscom/bizjournal11-11-010352.asp%3Fbizj%3DSAC+kaiser+permanente+loss+rat io&hl=en&ie=UTF-8)

As an entry level candidate searching for work, I happened to be browsing for the profiles of various industry sectors, and came across an article that I thought painted a good picture of western healthcare providers. What do you think?

Here's another good link to the industry's snapshot:
http://www.hoovers.com/industry/snapshot/0,2204,23,00.html

:duh: Just wanted to share. :wink:

Is there a search engine online that compares premiums and rates the different medical plans of healthcare providers across the U.S.?

[Miguel on the Beach]

You will be able to find a lot of rates for Individual Health Insurance plans on the internet, including medical supplement and short term medical plans. Try ehealthinsurance.com for starters. Also you will find local & regional health brokers that have web sites and often carry rates. There are more and more companies that are now posting their Individual plan rates on their web sites too. Search on Google using the companies name and key words like "rates".

You will generally not find any small group or large group health rates on the internet. Rating for these is much more involved than just posting a rate table, it involves combining the ages of employees and dependents to get an age/sex factor for each group, in some states where allowed there are rate-ups for health conditions of members, some have participation factors based upon % of employees enrolling, rates may have selection factors for different combinations of plans selected by the group,........

If you'd like to see a good example of a broker web site which carries rates for different carriers go to the lowenthal insurance page which is a NW outfit at oregonhealth-insurance.com/oregonhealth.htm

Also, you can find much material from many company web sites about their plan designs, which can vary considerably across the country and from carrier to carrier, and from group to individual.