Big companies prune health insurance rolls

Corporations pare costs by targeting grown children, divorced spouses and others getting insurance coverage improperly.

By Robert Kazel, AMNews staff. Oct. 18, 2004.

A growing number of large companies grappling with rising health care costs are putting their insurance plan membership under scrutiny to find plan members claimed by employees as dependents who aren't entitled to coverage.

Some corporations, including Ford Motor and DaimlerChryler AG, are saving millions of dollars in company-paid premiums by bumping these "independent" dependents off the insurance rolls.

Although it isn't yet clear if any of these companies or their insurers will seek to recover past medical reimbursements paid to doctors in connection with these ineligible patients, at least one company -- Ford, which has trimmed 60,000 plan members using dependent audits since 2000 -- said it is requiring employees to pay back that money, but is not requiring physicians to do so.

Dearborn, Mich.-based Ford, which said it had $3.2 billion in U.S. health care expenses in 2003 and sponsors health insurance for 560,000 workers, dependents and retirees, has been especially aggressive at trying to pinpoint plan members who don't meet the company's dependent eligibility requirements anymore. In the case of children, they could be too old to qualify, not living with the parent anymore, out of college or no longer financially dependent. Ford also has looked to find ex-spouses of employees still getting insurance, said Marcey Evans, a company spokeswoman.