State employee and teacher health insurance got a close examination by a joint House and Senate committee on Tuesday. The group of lawmakers are looking for ways to cut healthcare costs to the state.
“We wanted to look at the current structure of Oklahoma’s different plans and specifically the difference between the state’s self-funded plan, HealthChoice, and the private insurer market,” said Senator Kim David, who with Rep. Michael Rogers, requested the study. “We need to know why we’re self-funded, if there’s a benefit in that, what type of competition we have with the private plans and why we’re not able to curb the ever increasing costs of our health insurance.”
HealthChoice is raising its rates by eight percent in 2017. That’s much lower than some non-state employee health insurance premium hikes announced earlier this year.
Rogers fears health care costs for school employees is getting out of control.
“My concern is why have we had a $162 million increase in education employee premiums since 2008? Are we doing anything to curb those costs and if not, why?” asked Rogers. “We have to find a way to curb and offset those costs because if not, we’re on our way to spending $1 billion for school employee benefits annually in less than 15 years and as a state, we can’t afford that. It doesn’t help our students or our teachers.”
David noted that health care costs are a factor in preventing lawmakers from giving teachers raises.
“If we want to give our teachers a pay raise, right now everything that we have keeps going into covering their additional healthcare costs. And now we’re looking at another eight percent increase in that,” David explained. “Healthcare costs are spiraling out of control every year. That additional money could be used in other areas if we could find a way to curb those costs with better health outcomes.”
The committee also received information about programs which could help curb costs. HealthChoice is trying to achieve savings by bundling payments, incentivizing members to use lower cost providers and better management of pre-Medicare population costs. GlobalHealth, an Oklahoma-based health maintenance organization (HMO), has implemented a program the last two years that uses analytics to find members whose health is most likely to get worse and try to prevent dangerous health events. The program has reduced emergent hospital admissions by 18 percent and re-admissions by 22 percent.
Other cost saving pilot programs were also outlined.
However, the head of the Oklahoma Public Employees Association (OPEA) believes the interim study was meant to clear a path for lawmakers to cut state employee benefits.
“We are four months away from the next legislative session and some politicians are already talking about cutting state employee compensation,” said OPEA Executive Director Sterling Zearley. They are saying Oklahoma needs to cut benefits even though an independent expert said pay needs to be increased before we discuss benefit reduction.”
He said the election is an opportunity to put lawmakers into the Legislature who will support state employee benefits.
