I understand your concern with fringe benefit rates for postdoc fellows
and have just learned yesterday that my institution (Beth Israel
Hospital, Boston) is implementing a new policy effective FY95.  "Currently,
no fringe benefits are charged for stipend payments against Special Fund
accounts (grants) in spite of the fact that stipend recipients are
provided essentially the same fringe benefit package as all other BI
employees.  DHHS  has recognized this fact also and, starting in FY 95,
stipend payments will be treated as salary and wages for purposes of
computing our new DHHS FY94 fringe benefit rate.  The hospital has
decided to defer recovering fringe costs for stipends until 4/9/95 and to
decrease the rate from the office rate of 26% to 22.6%.  In addition, for
grants that specifically exclude funding for fringe benefit costs for
stipends (primarily NIH training grants), no fringe rate will be
applied."  I am not knowledgable to how Medicaid/Medicare reimburse
hospitals for training expenses for fellows and do not know how they compute
benefits and/or whether or not this is computed into the reimbursement.  I
am sure that this has been an issue that has been reviewed by the
hospital administration.  I'll be interested to see how others are
handling this.