SHIRLEY — Facing a deficit and seeking ways to cut costs within a level-serviced budget, Town Administrator Patrice Garvin has been looking into the town’s historically generous health-insurance benefits and reported her findings to selectmen Monday night.
Garvin said, “We can really make a huge savings” of as much as $146,081 annually, via changes in policy that affect health-benefit eligibility and the percentage split, among other things.
With health-insurance costs projected to rise by 8 percent in fiscal 2015, cost-saving options laid out in her report included changing the design plan and tightening the rules about who gets insurance coverage and how the percentage paid for premiums is split between the town and the employees, elected officials and on-call firefighters eligible to sign up for coverage under the town’s health-insurance plan.
Any design-plan changes would be covered under Mass General Law, Chapter 69, which state legislators passed in 2011.
“A lot of towns have moved in (this) direction,” Garvin wrote in the report, which lists the particulars by which those changes can be made.
After meeting with the town’s health-insurance provider and the finance team, she advised the board to consider a “cafeteria type plan” offered by the town’s current provider, MIIA Health Benefit Trust.
Any proposed changes will be discussed with the unions and other town employees and she plans to meet with the Insurance Advisory Committee soon, Garvin said.
Besides “moving toward plan design,” with a specific option targeted, the team recommended the following changes to the town’s health-insurance policy:
* Full-time employees (20 hours a week or more) who sign up for insurance with the town would pay 75 percent of the premium for their plan, while the town picks up the other 25 percent. This would reverse the existing policy in which the 75/25 split works the other way around, with the town paying the larger percentage.
On-call firefighters would still be eligible to participate but must pay 100 percent of the cost.
Selectman David Swain favored the proposal as presented.
“I have no issues at all” he said. “We definitely need to change the plan.”
“I’m on board, too,” Selectman Robert Prescott said. “It’s been on my mind for some time.” Besides the savings, the issue is about fairness, he said, and he also favors reversing the percentage split for elected officials insured under the town’s plan.
He asked if it’s possible to write in a sunset clause that would allow firefighters and elected officials covered under the previous split to continue paying the smaller percentage until their terms are up, but which would close the door to such arrangements in future.
Garvin said she thought it would be legal.
In that case, “the door closes today,” Swain said.
Selectmen voted unanimously to accept the plan as presented, subject to Town Counsel’s call on the phased-out percentage split.
“We probably didn’t make a lot of friends with that decision,” Chairwoman Kendra Dumont said, but said the recommended adjustments will benefit the town and taxpayers.
From www.lowellsun.com
