Medford school board made the responsible insurance choice

Star News

Editorials

Members of the Medford School Board put the concerns of taxpayers above the interests of employees last week. Board members made the right, and financially responsible, choice last week when they approved switching the district’s health insurance provider from Aspirus to Security Health Plan in order to save $108,000 in premium costs.

Come January, school district employees and their families will have the headaches of dealing with a different insurance bureaucracy than what they had to work with under the existing Aspirus plan the district offered. While any change brings with it headaches for those involved, this is secondary to the board’s obligation to be good stewards of taxpayer resources.

Both insurance carriers had submitted proposals for the district’s annual $7.29 million insurance contract with comparable levels of coverage and number of providers.

The Security Health Plan proposal came in with a price that was a 6% increase over the previous year compared to the 7% increase presented by Aspirus in their plan renewal.

Both proposals were well below the 10% increase the district had included in the 2022-2023 budget. The savings will allow that money to be spent on other district needs such as facilities improvement, educational materials, projected energy cost increases or staff wages. Any of these are a better use of the money than shipping it off to an insurance company’s coffers for the sole benefit of sticking with the status quo.

In this case, Medford is fortunate that the size of its insurance contract attracts competition. Many smaller employers, both in the public and private sectors, don’t have this ability and instead are stuck with whatever their carriers decide the renewal rate should be.

Fortunately, Medford schools were not in the position this year to need drastic changes in insurance plan coverage. This is not the case for many employers whose only recourse in combatting price increases is to reduce coverage or pass additional out of pocket costs onto their employees in the form of higher premiums or increased deductibles.

For many workers, the insurance death-spiral hits them both coming and going with spiraling increases in out of pocket costs and a downward spiral in actual coverage. Employees and employers are punished if people have the audacity to actually use their health insurance coverage and carriers and agents ghoulishly celebrate the loss of “high cost users,” whose chronic and lifethreatening illnesses impact their bottom lines.

This is a reality of the broken American healthcare system which sees employers wanting to do right by their employees but being faced with harsh economic realities.

Until something is done at the state or national level to address rising healthcare costs — and the many factors that contribute to those costs — local public and private sector employers will be faced with making tough decisions in order to maintain their bottom line.