Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 (Agenda)
Item 7
>> number 7, consider and take appropriate action on the following employee benefit plan renewal items for 2012 plan year.
a, uhc administrative rates for fiscal year 2012, and I guess uhc still means united health care.
>> it does.
>> b, retiree contribution amounts for the over 65 retiree pharmacy-only plan .thank you, judge.
cindy harrington, hrmd.
we do this every year.
we bring a list of the administrative rates that we're being charged by united health care and we get you to approve them as a matter of course.
this year we took care to lay out exactly what those fees are and what they include.
this the past we probably combined them into kind of general categories for you and we wanted to be more specific because united health care as our third party administrator performs a lot of services for us and does not nickel and dime us for each and every one.
they also combine them into broad categories, but we've done an exercise this year to try to determine exactly what's included in that admin fee and make sure we're getting the full bang for our buck.
they've been very supportive in all of the efforts that we've undertaken as far as educating our employees and providing us some state-of-the-art benefits.
so they've been our third-party administrator since 10-1-01 and they administer the process, the cobra, they do some health support, disease management programs. We've even had an on-site united health care customer service representative that could help employees one on one with any escalated claims issues they weren't able to resolve themselves.
we -- on the fund fee only rates, we neglected to bring these when we brought the rates earlier in the year and we wanted to get the pharmacy only rate approved.
this plan would be used by someone that is choose to go have medicare as their medical carrier but they just want the pharmacy piece of the plan.
and actually we have very few people on this plan.
you would think it would be a little more popular than it is, but we have less than five participating on this pharmacy-only plan right now.
which you would think it would be a little more popular.
>> five people?
>> uh-huh.
>> really?
wow.
>> most of our retirees get the full package, the medical coverage and the pharmacy coverage that goes with the medical coverage.
but we had several requests for a pharmacy only type plan so we do offer it.
>> do we think that the eligible retirees know about it?
>> yes, sir, it's on everything that we send out to them.
however, I think -- when you get to be a retiree, one of your greaters fears is not having enough insurance and I think sometimes that the retirees may have many levels of insurance and they are just afraid to -- to kind of go bare and have medicare as their primary care year.
sometimes we find our retirees are overinsured.
the ones that have tri-care or maybe just want medicare as primary coverage, this provides a useful service so they have good drug coverage.
>> I would add to that the cepo rate for our over 65 retiree rates is comparable so why get the pharmacy only.
it's such a comparable rate so that might be.
>> what's the cost to the county of maintaining that program if only five people are utilizing it and it's comparable to --
>> we're not getting really much of an a dmin fee from united to process the claims because it's just pharmacy.
they don't have to go through the whole claims process.
so basically the setup which they really didn't charge us to set it up.
at some point and every year we look at it like do we want to continue this program or not, we kept it is same as last year and as in all of the benefit stuff we look at that every year and at some point we may decide for five people it may not be worth continuing.
>> or if rates go up, it may be -- it may be that program becomes more popular.
>> if costs go up, we may have to look at the rate.
I did want to point out that the actual admin rate did go down.
last year we were paying $40.50 per employee per month.
and we were able to negotiate it down and dan and diane did a wonderful job of neglecting with united health care to reduce the cost to $39.58.
that's a 2% decrease.
in the environment where everything is going up, sometimes 5, 10, 20% to get a decrease is kind of unheard of.
that shows me that united health care is showing a willingness to work with us because they like having us as a client and they are working with us on things.
the other rates pretty much stayed the same.
>> [one moment, please, for change in captioners]
(Missing caption text for last two minutes and thirty seconds of this item. The motion carried by unanimous vote.)
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
