Poor Health
If you're waiting on the government or anyone else to do something about the rising costs of health benefits, face facts: If you want costs cut right, you have to cut them yourself.
When Kiersty Lombar was shopping for health insurance for the seven employees of her year-old online coffee and gourmet-foods company, she faced two challenges. "We had limited funding, yet we needed a competitive benefit package to recruit people," she recalls. Lombar, 27, worked with an online insurance broker to find the right plan. She finally settled on a Preferred Provider Organization (PPO), a form of managed care that offers more freedom and a wider range of choices than the traditional health maintenance organizations (HMOs).
Today, Lombar's company, The Perk.Com, offers generous
health-care benefits. The Austin, Texas-based company pays 100
percent of its employees' costs and 60 percent for spouses.
"It's important for us to take care of our
employees," reasons Lombar. "We see this as a recruiting
and retention tool. Even though we felt like we were at the mercy
of the insurance companies, we decided it was something we
couldn't cut back on."
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