Health plans for restaurant workers

WASHINGTON – More than three years before the new health care law overhauls the nation’s insurance market, the National Restaurant Association and insurance giant UnitedHealth Group are teaming up in a bid to make coverage more accessible to millions of restaurant workers without health benefits.

The initiative, though limited at the outset, marks one of the largest private sector efforts to expand health insurance coverage.

And its architects say it could ultimately help cover the estimated 4 million to 6 million restaurant employees without health benefits, or some 10 percent of the nation’s current population of uninsured.

The association plans to announce today, at its annual convention in Chicago, a website and a menu of insurance plans in Pennsylvania and Colorado and then expand into California, Texas, Florida, Illinois and several other states within a year.

“This is a business issue for the restaurant industry,” said Dawn Sweeney, chief executive of the influential restaurant group, which represents 380,000 employers nationwide. “Because of the narrow profit margins of the restaurant business, it has been an ongoing real challenge for our industry to find affordable (insurance) products they could offer to employees.”

It also is a top concern for state officials such as Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat who is trying to stop the erosion of insurance coverage until the state can create a new insurance exchange in 2014, as outlined in the recently passed health care law.

Pennsylvania, like many states, plans to operate a government-overseen insurance marketplace where small businesses and individuals should be able to shop for insurance coverage that meets basic minimum standards.

For now, the restaurant industry, which employs nearly 13 million people nationally, has among the lowest levels of health coverage, a reflection of the transitory nature of the work force and the prevalence of part-time workers, and the small margins.

The new partnership will initially provide restaurant owners and employees with a web portal to shop for insurance products currently offered by Minnetonka, Minn.-based UnitedHealth, the nation’s largest insurer by revenue.

The menu of options is to include policies that employers could select if they want to provide their employees with benefits as well as individual plans that restaurant workers could select if their employer does not offer coverage.

UnitedHealth officials said the employer-sponsored plans – including one designed to cover preventive care, routine office visits and catastrophic events, with a gap or “donut hole” in coverage in between – could be available for 10 percent to 20 percent less than traditional HMO and PPO health plans offered to small businesses.

But UnitedHealth chief growth officer Austin Pittman said the company would continue its standard underwriting practices, which could include denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions. That practice will not be banned until 2014.