What are the advantages and disadvantages of an HMO?
The basic advantage of an HMO is that there's very little out of pocket. You go in, you pay $10 for this. You go to the hospital, you pay $200 for that and you have no more expenses. Everything pretty much is covered. The disadvantages are that sometimes you can't use a doctor that's outside of the system that you really want to go to. One of my very, very good clients, and one of my best friends, has a daughter with a back disorder. He (her father, my client) went through the internet and went through tons of doctors all over the United States to find the one doctor that can do a special surgery. He went to that doctor. She did the surgery. His daughter's completely recovered and had 100% recovery. Had she had an HMO, maybe the result wouldn't have been the best. In today's world, if you know that there's the best doctor out there, why not go to him? That's the limitation of an HMO. Not to say that there aren't fantastic HMO doctors, but you have to be extremely proactive. You have to be much more aggressive in the system. You have to go and find the best doctors. You've got to do a lot of homework. You've got to ask a lot of questions of HMO doctors regarding who's the best, and you've got to push to get to that quality doctor.
