Ralph Pontillo is president of the Erie-based Manufacturer’s Association of Northwest Pennsylvania (MANP), which includes 7,800 member organizations and affiliates. He worries about health care costs, about negotiating efficient service arrangements for his member companies, and about some companies dropping health insurance as a benefit.

For MANP, UPMC Health Plan represents much-needed competition in the health insurance business. Mr. Pontillo concedes that competition in western Pennsylvania was unable to keep costs from rising, but it did keep them from going even higher.
“Anything that promotes competition is good overall,” Mr. Pontillo says.

Fayette County commissioner Sean Cavanagh agrees that competition is important: “In this day and age, you’ve got to be competitive. UPMC Health Plan delivers a quality product at a price that their competitor could not match.” Fayette County recently switched to UPMC Health Plan for its more than 400 employees.

King’s Family Restaurants also has UPMC Health Plan insurance for its employees. Jim Pish, King’s Director of Human Resources, says: “I like that UPMC Health Plan is not bogged down with as many rules as the other insurance companies. There’s much more flexibility to deal with situations as they come up. As for complaints from members, I don’t hear too many. UPMC Health Plan is a very viable option for our employees.”

Employers, consumers, regulators, and the industry itself now bring greater scrutiny to health care costs, and to health plans themselves.

UPMC Health Plan remains financially stable. A.M. Best Company, the nation’s oldest and most authoritative source of insurance company ratings, reaffirmed our financial strength with a rating of B++, or “very good.” Best noted that the Health Plan reported an underwriting gain and a net profit for the last nine months of 2002, and that both administrative and medical expenses were declining.

In spite of the cost savings and competitive advantage we’ve been able to offer our employer customers, double-digit increases in health insurance premiums have become a fact of life for us as well as for our competitors.