During an Oct. 26 regular meeting, the Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200 school board voted 4-3 against renewing the medical and dental plans that cover over 500 district employees ahead of Nov. 1, which is when open enrollment starts.
The vote means that enrollment will likely be delayed while the plans go back to the district’s Insurance Committee — a body that includes members of the Faculty Senate, buildings and grounds, administration, non-affiliated personnel among other employee groups — for re-evaluation.
At Thursday’s meeting, all board members expressed serious concerns about the recent increase in the cost of funding insurance premiums, but not all members were willing to potentially disrupt the open enrollment process for employees by voting against renewal.
Members Jackie Moore, Sara Dixon Spivy and Jennifer Cassell all voted for the renewal despite their concerns about insurance costs. Board members Fred Arkin, Matt Baron, Tom Cofsky and Craig Iseli voted against the renewing the plans.
Gallagher Benefits Services Inc., the third-party firm that administers the district’s claims in exchange for a monthly fee, had initially projected a 7.4 percent increase in premiums, or around $584,000.
Lisa Yefsky, a Gallagher representative, said that after changes were made to the plans by the Insurance Committee, which included requiring employees to pay more money for emergency room services and picking up twice the copay for specialist visits, projected costs increased by only 5.8 percent.
District 200 funds its own health plans, which it pays Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois to administer, and directly pays for claims and administrative fees. Employees pay a portion of the cost of premiums, along with other out-of-pocket expenses.
The Insurance Committee is responsible for reviewing proposed plan renewals and making recommendations to the school board. According to Tod Altenburg, the district’s chief financial officer, the committee, which is represented by all of the employee groups at the high school, “gives careful consideration to all parties when developing their recommendations.”
Altenburg added that the committee makes decisions based on industry norms and the insurance practices of similar school districts. The committee also reviews data showing how claims are utilized to determine how plan changes affect employees, he added.
Some board members, however, said that they were dismayed by the district’s high insurance costs relative to other school districts and the seeming inability of administration officials to get a handle on them.
Cofsky, who pulled the proposal to renew the plans from a list of other items that were to be voted on all at once in a consent agenda, had a range of concerns with the renewal.
“Regardless of whether I’m in support or not of this I think this item should not be on the consent agenda, because of the magnitude,” he said. “This is the single largest annual expense that this board approves every year.”
According to school board members, the district’s total health insurance costs for next year is projected to be around $9.1 million.
“In prior years, I’ve asked questions about the competitive assessment of our plans despite being shunned by committee members,” Cofsky said, adding that his own analysis showed that the district might be paying more in insurance costs than it needs to be paying.
Cofsky singled out a PPO family plan, which has 120 participants, as a plan that is “very close to the Cadillac tax,” or a tax paid on plans that exceed $10,200 in premiums for each individual and $27,500 for families.
“Our [family] plan is in the $26,500 range,” Cofsky said. “I’m not concerned personally that the tax will even go into place, but the fact that we’re up against it tells me something.”
Cofsky said that he doesn’t think that the amount the district is spending on health insurance costs “is good for our students and I don’t think it’s good for our taxpayers.”
Yefsky said that the district’s increasing claims are largely due to the fact that the district’s employee population has experienced more births over the last year and sickness among older employees. She said that some other, comparable school districts with lower insurance costs singled out by Cofsky (they weren’t named during the board discussion) did not support retirees as D200 does.
Brenda Horton, the district’s human resources director, said that the Insurance Committee explored some measures that would potentially reduce costs, such as implementing preventative and wellness programs.
But those gradual steps didn’t seem to make a deep enough dent in the cost curve, said Iseli.
“It feels like we’re working incrementally around an anchor,” Iseli said, adding that he doesn’t believe the committee is incentivized to deep cost savings.
Some board members had other concerns with the information contained in the proposed health insurance renewal. For instance, Cofsky and board member Fred Arkin said that the 5.8 percent increase, which had been readjusted from 7.4 percent after the committee made its changes, wasn’t clearly reflected in the documents they received.
During the Oct. 26 meeting, Supt. Joylynn Pruitt-Adams cautioned the board against voting down the renewal, considering the looming open enrollment period.
“Costs need to be taken into serious consideration but there’s a process that that has to follow,” Pruitt-Adams said, adding that if the board did not vote to renew that night, then the plans would have to go back to the Insurance Committee and closing the window on how much time the administration has to finalize the proposed plan changes before Jan. 1.
The board meeting could vote to renew the plans at an Oct. 31 special board meeting.