“I don’t want you to get distracted by numbers.”
That was the Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA) director’s advice to a PEIA task force this week.
Of course, the PEIA director’s advice is in line with first familiarizing the 29 members of the task force in formative steps with the insurance plan.
But at some point, this task force is going to have to get seriously distracted by the numbers because that’s what it’s all about.
The detailed presentation on Tuesday on PEIA did display more than 100 slides and schedule more meetings. Some of those sessions include separate meetings of committees that were created earlier.
Nearly a dozen other public hearings of the task force will be held statewide and a couple will be livestreamed from Charleston.
The logic for now, is “You’ve got to know what you’re fixing before you fix it.”
We applaud this task force’s organization, agreeing to so many public hearings and its approach to this problem. It’s also comforting that, for now, PEIA’s premiums, deductibles and co-pays are frozen for the 2018-’19 fiscal year.
Yet, we cannot help but think that as much as time waits for no one, neither does medical/pharmaceutical inflation. And given that annual 5 percent to 7 percent rate of inflation, PEIA is going to need a bigger budget.
Most estimates of what would be needed to meet that rate run from $50 million to $70 million more a year — every year. The governor and lawmakers agreed to provide a lowly $29 million in supplemental funding for the coming fiscal year. That was only because investment earnings by PEIA in the 2017-’18 plan year curbed the need for a higher funding increase.
Needless to say, running an insurance plan with such unpredictable swings in operating costs is not sustainable. Furthermore, calling on public employees to continue chasing higher and higher premiums to pay for a plan that’s supposed to benefit them is also not viable.
It’s uncertain there is a permanent fix for tempering f PEIA’s costs in the future or health insurance in general.
But our advice to this task force is to explore diverting a permanent, more predictable financial stream to PEIA.
No, that may not be the permanent funding fix everyone wants, but it should at least lower future increases for public employees.
Another idea, which has come up before, is raising the 80-20 split this plan now entails for public employees to an 85-15 one.
Whatever the solution, the numbers will eventually still distract everyone.
FOR MORE INFO, go online to https://peiataskforce.wv.gov
