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Commissioners renew county’s health care coverage

Washington County Commissioners passed the renewal from the County Employee Benefits Consortium of Ohio for the county employee health insurance program for 2017 at their regular weekly meeting Thursday.

According to County Clerk Rick Peoples, Washington County has participated in the CEBCO group of counties since 2009.

After several meetings with department heads, elected officials and employees the commissioners decided to pass on the current program in favor of a plan with a 13.1 percent increase.

Commissioner Ron Feathers said this increase will affect approximately 371 out of the 600 county employees.

“We have decided to (eliminate) the current plan in favor of a slightly higher plan that would save a quarter of million dollars,” he said.

Feathers also said the county will still have to pay more by approximately a quarter of a million dollars for 2017 than in 2016.

“Not all of that money comes from county general funds,” he said. “Probably around 60 percent comes out of county general and the rest comes from other funding sources.”

The commissioners expressed that this was not an easy decision.

“We feel we are trying to be fiscally responsible and trying to move forward,” said Feathers. “By taking these preemptive steps to protect the solvency of Washington County we won’t have to wait and lay people off or maybe watch entire departments dissolve.”

According to Feathers, with this plan the county will still have to come up with an additional quarter of a million dollars just to pay for the plan.

Even though the offer for the renewal seems high, Peoples said this was the best option for the county.

“While our offer for renewal for 2017 seems rather high at 13.1 percent, we need to remember we entered the last two years with less than a 0.5 percent increase in each,” said Peoples. “So over the years it has been extremely beneficial to have been a member of CEBCO.”

According to Peoples, if the commissioners would have renewed the plan with no change in benefit structure, the plan would have had an additional cost of $567,343.

Feathers also said the current plan requires employees to pay $850 out-of-pocket, with an increase in deductibles and emergency room visits.

“We used to have a $1,000 deductible, but now we have a $1,500 deductible,” he said. “We used to have $150 plan to go to the emergency room, but now it will cost you $250. We are trying to get the people to move over into physician’s care or some other type of facility, and before we had 70/30 co-insurance and now it’s 50/50.”

Commissioner Rick Walters said this renewal actually has its advantages.

According to Walters the prescription drug co-pay is staying the same and there will be no change to the prescription drug programs.

“The idea though is to move forward in baby steps to try and keep a plan that still has co-pays,” said Walters. “We feel we’ve done what we can do to help the county sustain health care for the county employees without putting a huge burden on the employees and still be fair to the taxpayer.”

Walters said the commissioners discussed other plans, such as a healthy savings account option, before moving forward with their decision.

“We did have an HSA option which was an option that would actually reduce the county premium, but it had a $4,000 deductible and a $6,200 out of pocket,” he said.

Walters also said this option would have saved the county $150,000 overall.

The commissioners said if they had 10 percent of the county employees interested in the HSA option, they would develop a county contribution to help offset the deductible, but there weren’t enough employees interested.

Peoples said some of these options would have lowered the large dollar increase, but the option that was selected lowers the overall increase to $387,187 or $180,000 less than moving forward with the plan with no change in benefits.

“Even with this change in plan design the cost for health insurance for county employees will increase next year by about $387,187,” said Peoples.

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