Plan would offset Insurance spike.
Medical care is becoming more popular among employees at Utah State University, causing campus officials to make needed adjustments to the university’s health plan.
“Medical care is headed upward,” Director of the Student Health and Wellness Center Jim Davis said. “The university is using health insurance more.”
Davis presented changes to USU’s health plan Monday that would offset the 63 percent increase in insurance expenses for the 2006-07 school year without dipping too deep into employees pocket books.
If the university were to drop all rises in health insurance on the shoulders of its employees, they would be paying 16 percent of health care costs, or $95.99 dollars per month instead of $20.12.
“We felt like we needed to do something,” Davis said. “We felt like we could not pass those extraordinary costs onto our employees.”
Instead of boosting employees’ premiums, members of the USU Employee Benefits Advisory Board proposed an increase in costs to specific benefits within the university’s Blue and White plans.
Specifics to that plan include increasing the costs of emergency room co-pays, office visit co-pays and prescription drug coverage.
In that effort, Davis said the increases would effect a smaller percentage of employees that use those specific benefits rather than all employees if the university had simply increased the premiums.
However, even with the changes, employees will still need to pay a slight increase in premiums. One individual covered by USU’s health plan will pay $30.12 monthly instead of $20.12 and an entire family would pay $95.88 instead of $64.04, Davis said.
During this year’s legislative session, the state approved a 6.4 percent increase in funding for medical coverage but is still not enough to cover the university’s increases in health insurance costs, Davis said.
Although faculty members’ salaries were increased during this past session as well, some employees were worried that the increases in the specific benefits in each of the university’s health plans would offset their individual pay raises.
“The way to beat the system is to stay perfectly healthy and have no health plan and that doesn’t make sense to me,” Davis said. “We have to beat the technicalities.
Davis assured employees present at the meeting that the majority will benefit financially from utilizing these proposed changes. Glenn Ford, vice president for Business and Finance also added that the number one priority at USU is faculty and staff salaries and benefits.
Compared with most of its peer institutions that are also self-insured, USU requires its employees to pay the least amount in health care costs, Davis said.
“Our piece of pie is very small,” he said. “We compare very favorably with other health plans that are self-insured.”
-mmackay@cc.usu.edu