Health premiums for city employees to increase slightly

Oct. 29--Medical insurance rates for Joplin city employees will increase slightly next fiscal year.

The cost to provide health insurance for individual employees will go up $5.50 from $466.82 to $472.32 per month. Taxpayers pay all of the cost of the premium for single coverage so employees do not pay any of that cost.

Employees who have family will see an increase. Premiums for family coverage will go up $11.52 from $980.36 to $991.88. Taxpayers pay 75 percent of those premiums.

There will be no increase in the cost of the vision or life insurance premiums.

The City Council was told that by negotiating a five-year contract for health insurance services and administration, life and vision coverage using an insurance consultant, Segal Consulting, the city had helped hold down the costs. The administrator for the claims is Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield.

The city went to self-insurance coverage in 2011, depositing a lump-sum to start a self-insurance fund and buying insurance to cover claims over $150,000 to keep from draining the self-insurance fund.

Anthem charges a fee for that stop-loss insurance. That will cost $531,000, an increase of $44,000 from last year. However, the insurer will not increase the fee for administering claims, which will remain at $252,000.

Ruth Donahue, of Segal, told the City Council that the low amount of the increases is the result of the insurance fund having a low amount of claims for the year.

She said that using self-insurance and negotiated insurance contracts for processing claims has kept Joplin under the amount of increases experienced nationwide. She said the city's health benefits outlay has increased 6.3 percent over the eight years while the national trend has been more than 7 percent.

The city's finance director, Leslie Haase, said city employees have established a group, the Joplin Health Nuts, that works with employees to encourage fitness and to teach ways they can be better consumers of health care.

Health insurance was provided to 505 employees this year, Donahue said. The self-insurance fund started the year with a balance of more than $1.78 million. There was about $5.95 million paid into the fund by the city, employees and retirees to cover the cost of premiums. After claims and expenses for the fund were paid, the fund had an ending balance of slightly more than $2.12 million.

Donahue recommended that the fund have a surplus of $2.248 million. The fund has a shortfall of about $118,000 that she recommended be recovered through premium increases to employees in the future to bring up the surplus balance.

Rates as of Nov. 1

Joplin City Council approved the costs at a meeting Oct. 16. The new rates will go into effect when the city's new fiscal year begins Nov. 1.

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