WE THANK Mr Liew Meow Koon for his insightful comments in the letter on Monday, 'Portable medical plans: Why so slow?'

There are many companies whose enlightened management and human resource policies have allowed the ready implementation of Portable Medical Benefit Schemes (PMBS).

NTUC Income has more than 200 companies under the PMBS and some of these companies have as many as 3,000 employees each covered under the scheme.

In addition to the portability feature, PMBS provide much better cover than Group Hospital and Surgical insurance plans, which greatly benefit employees. There are additional costs involved and employees and unions must be willing to share some of these additional costs in order to make it viable for companies to move to PMBS.

There are Insurance Intermediaries and Benefits Consultants who have worked with us to place their clients on PMBS. They see that it is beneficial to their clients' employee retention policy by significantly improving the value of the medical benefits provided by the company as well as the company's image as a caring employer.

As risks are individually rated, it is not possible to include everyone. To include all pre-existing illnesses would escalate the cost of such schemes and consequently make them unsustainable in the long term.

However in all company schemes, NTUC Income will work with the employer to ensure that employees who cannot be included in PMBS, are able to retain their existing cover and are not worse off than when they were under the company's previous scheme. We provide yearly renewable Group Hospital and Surgical insurance to cover such pre-existing conditions.

Lee How Teck (Ms)
Senior Vice-President & General Manager
Group & Health Insurance
NTUC Income

This article was first published in The Straits Times on October 10, 2008.