Henderson’s City Council and city manager face a perpetual struggle to balance the needs of city taxpayers, who want to minimize expenses, and city employees, who want to maximize pay and benefits. That’s what makes the all-but-final city decision to switch health insurance carriers so special: It serves the interests of everyone.
To be sure, the health insurance policy from the North Carolina League of Municipalities is far from perfect.
The doubling of the deductible is the cruelest blow to employees, or at least the half of them who exceed the current $500 deductible in a typical year. That extra money will come out of their pockets.
As police Capt. Charles Crumpler told council members Tuesday night, employees should be grateful to have any health insurance, particularly a policy that requires no employee contribution to the premium for individual insurance.
Those city employees who pay to add insurance for children, spouses or both also can be grateful for the carrier change because they’ll take home more pay in the year starting July 1 than they did this year — up to $1,868.28 more before taxes, by our calculations. That’s real money in their pockets.
What makes the switch to the League’s insurance pool with the $1,000-deductible policy almost a no-brainer is that we taxpayers save as well — more than $150,000 off the budgeted amount for group insurance and more than $42,000 off the best price from Blue Cross and Blue Shield.
We say almost a no-brainer because council members John Wester and Harriette Butler raised some serious concerns about the switch.
Butler’s worry is about the quality of care, an area where Blue Cross has earned her trust, but to be honest, we don’t have much faith in any insurance company. As long as they provide the same coverage on paper and let us see the same doctors and get the same medications, we reckon they’re going to make us jump through more or less the same hoops.
Wester’s concern is financial and technical and falls within his area of expertise, insurance. While most of us look at Blue Cross and the League and see a couple of faceless companies, he sees numbers. Millions insured with Blue Cross, compared with a few thousand through the League. Hundreds of dollars paid through Blue Cross for a procedure that costs thousands with the League. Actuarial tables that justify one premium but not another.
We don’t pretend to understand Wester’s business, but we think we follow his bottom-line argument about the potential long-term cost of choosing the League: Because the League doesn’t have the clout to strong-arm doctors into giving the city the lowest possible prices for care, the city’s claims totals will be higher with the League, and that inevitably will lead to higher premiums, even if the city bids out the insurance contract and is willing to switch carriers every year.
And as a matter of principle, we support Wester’s call for the city to make more decisions with a long-term perspective.
But this employee insurance isn’t the place for the city to embrace the Gospel of Good Planning. Let’s start with capital projects — the water plant Wester touts, the sewer plant, Embassy Square, recreation, municipal offices — before we worry about fluctuating annual costs that are beyond the city’s control, such as fuel and insurance.
We don’t know how long the current health insurance system will even survive, with its annual double-digit price increases and its increasingly frustrated care providers. What we do know is that the city needs to save money now. City residents need to keep their expenses as low as possible now. City employees have to survive on their often-minimal wages now.
So now is the time to abandon Blue Cross and plunge back into the insurance pool of the League of Municipalities.