Putnam County employees will see an increase in co-pays after the county commission approved a slight change to the county’s health insurance.
Putnam County Mayor Randy Porter said due to the rising number of claims, the county faced an estimated $400,000 increase in health insurance costs. Insurance Broker Shawn Bennett said the county could reduce the increase to an estimated $180,000 if employees were willing to absorb the increased cost of certain prescription drugs. Bennett said the out-of-pocket max of $1,000 for an individual and $2,000 for a family would not change.
“Typically, somebody that’s in tiers five and six on these drugs, they are meeting their out-of-pocket max in a calendar year anyway, so we are not gonna see any effect on those,” Bennett said. “The only effect we are talking about is some of these tier two drugs, which are your non-preferred generics, and then your tier three and four will increase a little bit.”
Bennett said the increases on certain drugs range from $10-$40. Bennett said the health insurance plan the county offers is so good that it is almost unheard of.
“That’s the only reason this came up was to see if there were minimal ways to impact the employees, but also keep the county to where you are not eating this whole increase,” Bennett said. “Randy spoke to this a brief moment ago, guys, your claims are off the charts higher than they’ve ever been, and when they came out with these numbers and they came with this final number my recommendation as your broker is take this and run before they change their mind type of thing.”
Porter said having a good health insurance plan has provided great employee retention.
“This is one of the reasons we have been able to attract and keep employees is our insurance plan,” Porter said. “Especially over the years when the raises were not that good. People were staying because of TCRS retirement, and we still got the old retirement that has been there over the years, and the health insurance plan.”
Porter said the insurance committee had recommended the county pick up the $400,000 tab to keep the same insurance plans. Bennett said he wanted to present the alternative option with slight changes to the full commission.. The county commission approved the slight health insurance changes on Monday during the county commission meeting.
