Low prices keep vision and dental insurance attractive to companies dropping other types of coverage

• In recent years as San Francisco's Dome Construction Corp. was getting hit with big premium increases for health insurance, it did what many other companies were doing -- made its employees pay more of the costs.
• With health insurance premiums rising at double-digit rates during the past few years, employers have been struggling to find ways to rein in costs.
• Dental coverage costs about $27 per month for a single employee, and vision care can cost less than $10 per month.
• Unlike health insurance, many companies are paying little or none of the premiums for these added benefits, especially vision.
• Dome, for example, gives its workers a set amount of money to put into a tax-exempt savings account known as an FSA, or flexible spending account.
• "Employees are willing to have it, even though they're the ones who are paying for it," said Kate Renwick-Espinosa, a spokeswoman for VSP, a vision plan based in Sacramento that covers 38 million Americans.
• In 2000, about 28 percent of companies required their employees to pay the full cost of vision coverage, according to a survey of 1,000 employers by the Hay Group, a human resource consulting group based in Philadelphia.
• Jeff Album, a spokesman for Delta Dental, said companies are beginning to tinker with dental coverage by requiring employees to pay higher co-payments, deductibles and other costs.
• "Employers have a fixed amount of money to spend on benefits, and they're going to spend that first portion on medical, not dental, because medical is life and death and potentially catastrophic," Album said.
• Serious eye conditions are typically covered under the traditional medical insurance.
• That's because many of the drivers behind the explosive rise in health costs, particularly new technologies, are not as dramatic or expensive in optometry and dentistry.