[N]early six months after a new contractor stepped in to handle health care reimbursements for most Vermont teachers when the last company abruptly pulled out, educators are still complaining of unpaid bills — and some are even getting calls from collection agencies.
The trouble began when schools switched over to cheaper, higher-deductible plans on Jan. 1. About 80 percent of school districts decided to contract with Williston-based Future Planning Associates to administer a host of reimbursement accounts for employees, including health reimbursement, health savings and flexible spending accounts. In March, Future Planning announced it would withdraw from its contracts come May 1, leaving districts in the lurch and teachers with a string of unpaid claims.
Districts migrated over to DataPath, an Arkansas company. This summer, the new company wrote to school districts to tell them the client data provided to them from Future Planning was missing information on an “unknown” number of claims, and that it would need to start from scratch using Blue Cross Blue Shield claims files to process old reimbursement requests.
“When we took over your benefit plans three months ago, we weren’t fully aware of how complex the problems were, from incorrect plan structures to unprocessed claims,” the company wrote in an August memo to school districts.
The company’s customer service division has been inundated with calls and emails, DataPath said, with queries that were difficult to answer because of “bad, missing, or incomplete data.”
“None of this is acceptable. We apologize for the inconvenience, anxiety, and hardships this has caused, no matter who is responsible,” DataPath wrote in their memo.
Geoff Bennett, a teacher in South Burlington, is one such educator. He said he’s already had one package of bills worth more than $1,400 go a collections agency, with more outstanding claims in the pipeline.
The entire experience, he said, has been “extremely frustrating.”
“We’re having to make payments for things that we haven’t budgeted for because we’re supposed to have health insurance,” Bennett said. “We keep being told to wait. But it’s now almost to the end of October.”
Bennett has gotten on a payment plan for the bills that have already gone to a collections agency using money loaned to him by the South Burlington school district.
South Burlington schools business manager Amadee Denton said the district decided to start fronting teachers their health reimbursements after employees came to them over the summer with collection notices.
“It’s kind of the human aspect of it all,” she said.
Employees must file redacted health care invoices and promise to pay the district back once DataPath processes their claim. All told, Denton said, about a dozen employees have reached out for help and the district has loaned out just shy of $10,000 so far.
Representatives from both the Vermont Education Health Initiative, the nonprofit that buys health insurance plans for Vermont school districts, and the Vermont NEA said they were confident DataPath was making headway in processing delinquent claims.
VEHI trust administrator Bobby-Jo Salls said the company had already discovered and reimbursed more than $800,000 in missing claims using Blue Cross data. All together, the company had disbursed about $1.1 million in reimbursements just in the last three weeks, Salls said.
“I think they’re working very hard to get this through,” she said.
But it’s unclear how many outstanding claims the company must still process. Salls said VEHI has asked DataPath but hadn’t heard back yet.
And DataPath, for its part, confirmed numbers provided by VEHI but declined to comment about outstanding claims.
“We are proud of the progress we’ve made in processing outstanding claims through our partnership with VEHI,” DataPath Director of Administrative Services Ben Robbins said in a statement.
But in the meantime, educators say new requests still aren’t being processed in a timely manner.
Jacki O’Connor, a special educator at Lamoille Union High School, has only been using her school’s health insurance since July 1, when her husband switched jobs. But she says she already has $1,066 in unpaid reimbursement claims, some of which she’s paid out of pocket to keep debt collectors at bay.
“At this point I don’t even feel like it’s worth having health insurance,” she said.
