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Benefits plan continues to save city money
By Kenny Green, kgreen@starlocalnews.com
Recognizing he growing costs of employee benefits the city of Rowlett adopted a five year plan in fiscal year 2010 to control the city’s cost as much as possible. The city so far has seen the desired results of the program.
“The first budget that I was involved in, fiscal year 2010, we had a 18.7 percent increase in our insurance that year,” said Lynda Humble, city manager. “We were challenged to begin to develop a multi-year strategy to begin to address the increasing cost of benefits, specifically health insurance.”
As part of its strategy to curb costs, the city transitioned from a traditional fully-insured insurance approach to a partial self-funded insurance approach in fiscal year 2011. The city saved almost $930,000 last year as a result of the change. So far this year the city has already seen savings of $300,000 within the first six months.
Humble attributed the success to the change in culture among the city’s employees as one of the major reasons the program has been successful.
“In the past we failed to create a sense of engagement and ownership with our employees regarding health care,” said Shanté R. Jordan, director of human resources. “This lack of communication fostered a culture of uneducated consumers of health care. Our past way of handling health care issues was very reactive. We would constantly go out for bid to get lower rates.”
The increased communication with city employees regarding their healthcare has had positive results for the city. In fiscal year 2011, there was 99.4 percent participation of in-network office visits, 96.4 percent participation with generic pharmaceutical substitutions and 99.4 percent participation in in-network hospital admissions. The numbers have been even better in fiscal year 2012 with hospital participation at 100 percent.
One area of concern the city staff has is with the lack of employees having an annual physical. Humble said that the city’s numbers are partially skewed because police and fire department employees undergo a different physical that the insurance provider doesn’t recognize. The city will begin implementing better spouse and family engagement during its next plan year in an attempt to improve participation.
The city is also adding the requirement for an annual physical to the city’s wellness accountability program.
“We are going to get as close to mandatory as we can without causing problems,” Humble said.
The city will be making a couple of changes during its next benefit year strategy. One of the changes will occur because the city decided to become a tobacco free campus on Oct. 1. The city will add the ability to enroll in tobacco cessation program for those that want to quit smoking.
Another change to the program will be the inclusion of bariatric surgery.
“We had a request from an employee that has some health issues that would like to have this surgery. We investigated what all was involved in this. There are various types of gastric surgery,” Humble said. “This is going to be on an annual basis.”
Humble said that one of the city’s employees paid for the surgery on his own and has reduced his weight to half what it was. In addition he was on nine medications and now takes none.
“For him it was a life changing decision. He has met the goal of the wellness accountability program for sure,” Humble said. “This is one of those things we are going to try and see how it works.
The city will also begin contracting with Compass, a benefits concierge service. The company will provide assistance with any questions an employee may have, including billing and benefits.
“It takes the guesswork out of benefits. You just call them and they do the research,” Jordan said.
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