As legislators head toward another showdown with Gov. Phil Scott over school spending, the state’s teachers union has pitched a statewide health insurance plan that they say would save taxpayer money and ensure equity for employees.
More than 100 delegates at the union’s annual assembly voted on Saturday for the statewide benefit, which would avoid local-level negotiations that Scott says is costing the state millions, while increasing union representation in health care talks through the creation of a new oversight committee.
“It is clear that unless our members have the opportunity to work as equals with school boards in determining their health benefits … Vermont’s public school employees will continue to see health care become less affordable,” Martha Allen, president of the union, said in a press release issued Monday.
The statement came as the Vermont Education Healthcare Initiative board was meeting on Monday. The proposed committee, evenly divided between union representatives and governor appointees, would replace VEHI as the body charge with creating and overseeing the teachers’ health care benefit.
“Ever since we lost parity on the board of the Vermont Education Health Initiative, our voice into our own health care has been dimmed,” Allen wrote to union members on Monday. Those efforts continued when the governor and school board attempted to move health care negotiations from the district to state level last year, she said.
Jeff Fannon, executive director of the state teachers union, has a seat on the five-member VEHI board, but the union once held four of eight seats and until recently two of the five.
Under the union’s plan, the reformulated committee composed half of union appointees would hash out a single plan for all state education employees. The union said the plan will help find cost savings while making insurance more equitable and affordable for school staff. And, they say, it would establish a balance of power between school management and employees.
“At this point, employees at Vermont-NEA can’t even get a second at a meeting if a management person doesn’t want to second a motion by an NEA representative,” Allen said in an interview.
VEHI began as a partnership of the School Board’s Insurance Trust and the Vermont NEA, with two administrators, one from each organization, and eight members, four management and four employees. New rules under the American Health Care Act forced the Department of Financial Regulation to tell VEHI they had to restructure into a school board membership organization.
That’s when it became a five-person board leaving the VT-NEA with just two seats. That membership structure had representatives from four areas: a superintendent of schools, a school business manager, a school board member, and two slots for union leadership.
This change occurred as school boards across the state geared up to negotiate a record number of teacher contracts because of a looming deadline to move school staff to new health care plans. When VEHI decided in March 2016 to make the most generous of four new health care plans the default, some school board members felt the unions had too much influence on the VEHI board.
When the VT-NEA seat came up for re-election in 2016, 118 school boards petitioned to change the bylaws to give school boards an advocate on the board for balance. VEHI voted late that year for the seat to go to the executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association.
Last spring, Gov. Phil Scott proposed shifting teacher health care negotiations to the state to try to garner $26 million in savings from VEHI’s switch to new plans. Scott eventually agreed instead to form a commission to look into putting a statewide benefit in place.
In December, that panel recommended statewide negotiations and shifting all teachers to the same health care benefits to provide equity across the state. But they left it to lawmakers to come up with a plan to put their recommendations in place.
The report said that eliminating district-to-district variability from hundreds of contract negotiations would stabilize health care costs and allow a better understanding of VEHI’s actuarial assumptions, cost drivers and property tax implications. The report also found that a statewide plan would give workers access to the same benefit no matter where they live.
At that time, Darren Allen, spokesperson for the VT-NEA, was adamant that local bargaining was the best way forward, and equitable because all employees have access to the same four VEHI health care plans no matter where they live.
The union now seems to be changing course, giving in on local bargaining in favor of more power in state-level decision-making.
They are also appealing to the governor’s drive to enact cost containment on school spending, saying they will set up a research element to look for cost savings.
“[The commission] will vigorously research and foster the implementation of rational health care cost control opportunities,” the press release says.
The union wants lawmakers to take up their idea this session. They feel it has appeal for the governor and their own members, who backed it with a unanimous vote.
“The governor has said he wants health insurance for public school employees determined at the state level, and we hope he will see this proposal as the right way to design and implement plans that do right by the women and men who teach our state’s children,” Allen said.
