Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Laura Soares, Joe Zimmerman and Mark Hage, the managers of Vermont Education Health Initiative.
In a Vermont Digger opinion piece (“The Vermont health care system remains broken,” Dec. 5), the state’s health care regulators called a rate increase request by the Vermont Education Health Initiative proof positive the system is broken and “illustrates the urgency for action.” They also appear to believe VEHI blames health care reform mandates and assessments for the proposed rate hike. It doesn’t.
VEHI supports Vermont’s health care reform initiatives. For 20 years, VEHI has been a stabilizing force for school taxpayers in an at-times volatile and unpredictable health insurance market. Since its beginning, VEHI has provided predictability, efficiency and accountability regarding health insurance that has served very well our school districts, taxpayers, the teachers’ retirement system and the 42,000 Vermonters who rely on us for health care coverage.
Indeed, VEHI was founded to do exactly what it has done since 1993 – smooth out the rough edges of the health insurance market and deliver affordable, high quality coverage to school employees. It functions, obviously, within the existing health care system. There is no entity in the United States like VEHI, where local school boards and the educators’ union jointly operate a nonprofit trust designed to bring excellent health benefits to the men and women who work in the state’s public schools. VEHI has united all 275 public school districts and their employees into one statewide purchasing pool, saving school districts and Vermont’s taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
Our rate increase for next year is an anomaly caused by: increased use of health care by those we insure (there has been more specialized treatment for diseases like cancer); lower than expected investment returns; an increase in the costs of benefit mandates and assessments; and the end of a multi-year drawdown of our reserves.
We certainly understand the frustration of the state’s health care regulators. And we know that our proposed rate increase for the year beginning next July – as much as 14 percent – is dramatically out of character with most of VEHI’s premium increases over the last decade.
In our rate proposal – and in our explanation of it to school districts and the public – we spell out the factors requiring us to seek the biggest hike in our health insurance premiums since 2005. To put the increase request in context, VEHI’s rate increases over the past two decades have been over 10 percent only five times. In three of those years, premiums were the same or lower than they were the year before. And, in the last five years, rate increases have averaged less than 3 percent.
Our rate increase for next year is an anomaly caused by: increased use of health care by those we insure (there has been more specialized treatment for diseases like cancer); lower than expected investment returns; an increase in the costs of benefit mandates and assessments; and the end of a multi-year drawdown of our reserves.
Nowhere do we suggest that health care reform is causing this rate increase. To the contrary: we are not opposed to the mandates and assessments, and we are not opposed to health care reform. But, just like everybody else, we are adjusting to the evolution of a new private insurance market.
Health care reform is, without a doubt, profoundly re-engineering the health insurance market and our health care system. VEHI is now working with state regulators to see how it can be a part of this new insurance market and, thus, contribute to the statewide effort to rein in costs, improve outcomes and ensure universal access to health care.
