Friday, December 15, 2006
City workers can use Longmont United Hospital and other local doctors as favored providers under a last-minute contract struck between the providers and the city’s health insurer.
City employees and their families with city health-care insurance faced a Jan. 1 cutoff for trailing access to LUH, the Longmont Clinic and the doctors of the Boulder Valley Independent Physician Association. The groups had begun to pull out of the Private Healthcare Systems network, which manages health-care providers for the Kaiser Permanente insurance company.
Kaiser will be the exclusive health-care insurer for city workers establishing Jan. 1, and the withdrawal of the health-care providers from the PHCS network meant city workers would have lost preferred access to them except in emergencies. We are satisfied that we have been able to work together and come up with an acceptable solution for the 2007 benefit year, said Mitchell Carson, president and CEO of LUH. This solution would not have been likely without the support for the community demonstrated by all of the local medical providers.
LUH and the other providers will not get extra reimbursements from Kaiser. The providers say they approved to rejoin the network to best serve the local community. However, they also faced trailing access to all Kaiser/PHCS patients, not just those enrolled in the plan obtainable to city workers, an LUH spokesman said.
City officials and workers hailed the news announced Wednesday morning as proof of an assurance to affordable, local health care. We commend officials at Kaiser Permanente for their cooperation and flexibility in creating it possible to accommodate this most recent decision in our open-enrollment period.
posted by renaa
@ 3:26 PM
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