BUSINESS

Wisconsin businesses float rate-setting plan to control health care costs

Milwaukee-area employers suggest capping pay for doctors and hospitals. Meanwhile, physician groups and others offer their own proposals.

By Mike Norbut, AMNews staff. March 17, 2003.

Physicians may be used to dealing with fee schedules imposed by private insurers and Medicare, but some may soon find the same limitations in dealing directly with businesses.

Several Milwaukee-area employers are looking into controlling their health care costs by setting the rates that they are willing to pay for services provided by contracting doctors and hospitals. If companies adopted the idea and physicians and hospitals didn't choose to accept offered fees, company employees would theoretically have to make up the difference.

The idea, floated by the Business Health Care Group of Southeast Wisconsin, is the latest example of groups mobilizing to investigate rising health care costs.

Wisconsin physicians, hospitals and labor groups also have trumpeted their own ideas for how to cut costs.

"Ideally, you'd have employers, government, insurance companies and [physicians and hospitals] try to work together on health care costs," said Mark Knight, a health care consultant and president of Knight Consulting Group LLC in Milwaukee. "In the businesses' defense, they've seen their health insurance premiums skyrocket over a few years."

Fifteen businesses and two business organizations -- representing nearly 50,000 employees -- have joined the group based on a recent regional cost study by Mercer Human Resource Consulting. The study reported Milwaukee-area costs were 55% higher than those in other metropolitan areas. Mercer has also been retained to investigate the fee schedule issue.

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