Editor’s note: This commentary is by Rama Schneider, who is a member of the Williamstown School District Board.
[I]t’s been five years since the inception of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, Obamacare), and the majority of contracts defining the working conditions and compensation relationship between school districts and administrators and teachers are fast approaching a decision point. The favored source of health insurance for these groups, the Vermont Education Health Initiative (VEHI), is going to become untenable for school budgets and the taxpayers who support them.
The simple fact is that by the current ACA standards Vermont’s school administrators and teachers generally have health insurance plans that are rated “Platinum+” and sometime around 2018 will begin having an excise tax applied. Although these plans are grandfathered, they will become prohibitively expensive for school districts. (There are some who are in newer VEHI plans that aren’t Platinum+, but these plans are not grandfathered due to when they came into existence.)
And this brings us to the biggest change of them all: How are school boards going to move the staff to the new exchange system where, by design of the ACA, everyone will have some financial risk at play?
This “skin in the game” idea is good for the taxpayers, school budgets and individuals. The concept is simple: Being more effective with our non-emergency medical decisions will reduce health care utilization and this should result in less expensive insurance rates. For example, most preventative services in ACA plans are provided with no co-pay so annual physicals and such will hopefully become the norm. The medical profession keeps insisting that early diagnosis of even long-term problems leads to more effective and financially efficient care (and I believe my doctor), and because of this there should be a lowering effect on our bottom lines — insurance premiums.
Think of this health insurance elephant in the room as a catalyst. For the first time in decades we have an opportunity for widespread reconsideration of what is in our contractual agreements, what should be there, and how we can move from the former to the latter.
Vermont’s teachers have always been paid below the national and regional average, and decades ago agreements were made between boards and educator associations to give very generous health insurance coverage in place of then more expensive large pay increases. Over time, this dynamic has flipped and the inflationary dollar value in insurance premiums has outstripped the cost of direct salary promotions. This status quo has resulted in one of the largest uncontrollable costs for school boards that forces money to be funneled away from general educational programs.
I am one school board member who firmly believes we must regain control over contractual health insurance premiums.
Are you geared up to get rid of a bunch of costs without having to make a trade-off? Think again. I have a hunch we’re going to be looking at transforming the compensation side of our staff contracts at the same time we change the benefits side. I fully support a plan that saves money in personnel costs and passes some of those saving on to the valuable front line educators of our children.
The path forward I see is one of cooperative bargaining where everyone sits down at a table without sides, define what the various interests are and list the markers that define a satisfying of those interests, and then move forward. This is not going to be easy for anybody, but if we insist on contentious position based bargaining I believe we are going to see imposed contracts and staff strikes at a dramatically higher rate.
Oh yeah — there is also going to be a need for legislative intercession only this time on behalf of, not in opposition to, the school boards. Administrators, teachers and other staff are going to have to be told they are moving to exchange plans.
I think there is more promise than peril if we work together. Think of this health insurance elephant in the room as a catalyst. For the first time in decades we have an opportunity for widespread reconsideration of what is in our contractual agreements, what should be there, and how we can move from the former to the latter. At the end of the day we all want to see a high functioning school district where student learning is the focus of dedicated staff and administration who deserve respectful treatment and compensation with oversight provided by school boards interested in supplying the necessary tools in a manner and at a cost the community can support.
Is Vermont’s education community ready for some cooperative bargaining?
