From the President
Following my presentation (the complete text of which appears on our website, www.pft1603.org ) Debra Grabel, 790’s field rep, spoke, and then Lynn Long, the Field Rep for the large number of Local 39 members present.
The messages given to the Board were clear:
1) Changes, if any, to our benefits package can only come after careful scrutiny by the District’s Health Benefits Committee. This committee knows that its final recommendations will impact all segments of the District for years and years to come. It is an awesome responsibility and one that needs adequate time. The District’s Chief Negotiator, on the other hand, wants to bypass this committee, declare impasse, go into fact-finding and impose an ill-conceived plan that will result in a lose-lose situation for everyone in the District (except him—he would continue to bill the District approximately $250 per hour for his services).
2) The District is in drastic need of administrative restructuring. It is unconscionable for the District to demand draconian changes in health care, and deny increases in compensation, to a faculty that ranks #61 in salary out of the state’s 72 districts, while maintaining one of the highest administrator-to-FTES ratios in the State of
The objectives here are simple: maintain growth, streamline the administrative structure and direct a share of the savings and money that comes into the District to move the faculty’s compensation toward equity with the rest of the Bay 10.
The PFT thanks Ray Chamberlain, Ann Kircher, Miriam Zamora-Kantor,
The good news is that the Board heard our messages and directed the Chancellor to instruct its Chief Negotiator to let the Benefits Committee do its work and not press benefit issues at the bargaining table. This immediate victory is a tribute to you, the membership. You took to heart the labor axiom that “contracts are not won at the bargaining table,” and you showed up in force. Huge turnouts at Board meetings can pay dividends. March 9th was a beautiful sight. You shoulda been there.
The battle is not over. Please check out our website, www.pft1603.org, weekly for breaking news. Watch for future emails from the PFT Staff. And prepare to attend the May 11th Board Meeting. Your economic future is at stake. To paraphrase Molly Ivins: If you don’t participate, you can’t bitch.
In Solidarity,
Health Benefits: A Junior Faculty’s View
By Matt Goldstein,
As a relatively new faculty member—I joined the Laney English Department in Fall 2002—I’ve had my share of nervous hallway conversations about the demise of recent hires’ healthcare benefits.
“We’ll get a box of Band-Aids and a rabbit’s foot,” I’ve whispered more than once. “The old-timers’ll get to keep the whole enchilada.”
I’ve mixed metaphors, sure, but my main concern has been consistent—viz., that the PFT, in its ongoing negotiations with the District, will preserve the benefits of retirees and soon-to-be retirees by offering up those of newer members.
Nor have my worries been altogether irrational. After all, the
While many of us greenhorns resented shelling out $1,800 apiece while most of the old salts paid nothing, we kept quiet, remembering that it was the vets’ tough negotiating that got us the fat benefits in the first place. The automatic two-step jump the PFT promised we’d get in 2005 took some of the sting out, too.
But there was another reason to fret: the PFT negotiating team, with one very capable exception, was stacked with people nigh-on retirement. With a lone novice in the group tasked with taking on the District, it seemed that, their good intentions notwithstanding, negotiators simply couldn’t represent the interests of all members.
Add to these misgivings the District’s (rather plausible) claim that the state budget crisis means no money for the kind of benefits Peralta employees have enjoyed for so long, and you’ve got the recipe for legitimate anxiety. With both a low-for-the-area salary and second-rate benefits, I asked myself, can I afford to work at this place?
But recent conversations with the PFT brass—folks I like and trust, incidentally—have left me feeling somewhat more relaxed. Benefits for retirees won’t be touched, it seems, and neither will those folks who are about to retire; it’s wrong, though, to think that newcomers—who almost certainly will soon have a less generous benefits package—are footing the bill. While no deal’s been struck yet, it’s my impression that both sides see where we’re headed.
Fact is, healthcare costs a lot more than it did a generation ago, and the big insurance companies that hawk plans to employers like Peralta won’t sell the District coverage of the kind it’s bought for years. Meanwhile, the District is legally obligated to continue paying both for its retirees’ benefits and for those of employees hired before 1982, when Peralta teachers won collective bargaining rights. While a case can be made that even those hired after 1982 should have the right to retire with the benefits they were promised when they signed on, the argument would likely have to be made, at considerable length and prohibitive cost, in court.
Read the papers, as Bruce Jacobs pointed out at the last general membership meeting, and you’ll find that healthcare’s sick everywhere. Knowing that Safeway employees now cough up co-pays when they go to the doctor may not make us feel any better about our own woes, but it should remind us that the sad reality of life in America today is that healthcare costs an obscene amount of money.
The bad news, then, is that those of us who are relatively new to the District will soon be receiving a leaner benefits package than we were counting on when we came aboard. The good news is that we’ll have benefits that will put us in somewhere in the middle of the Bay 10, and perhaps a little more dough in our pockets—provided that we get the salary offset on which the PFT conditions any benefits cut.
So looking ahead, what can those of us whom PFT President
Next, we can work hard to ensure that compensation and other quality-of-life issues aren’t overlooked in future negotiations. We shouldn’t let healthcare become our sole focus, particularly as other key aspects of our personal and professional lives (e.g., department chairs and teaching-load requirements) are at stake. When the current Contract gets signed, probably in the next month or so, it’ll only bind us for three years. After that, the whole business starts over, and we control our own fate.
For the time being, I plan to weigh the deal the PFT comes back with. I’d like to see a proposal that features a couple of options on the healthcare front, an econo model and, at a higher cost to the insured, a deluxe model (most big employers offer such a choice). If the tentative agreement includes at least one fairly-priced benefits package that falls within the range of what’s possible in today’s healthcare environment—and if it’ll adequately cover my family and me—it’ll get my vote.
Health Benefits Committee Update
By
The Benefits Committee was charged by the PFT (Letter of Agreement,
“Consistent with its duties under Article 22.H, the health benefits committee shall review by
PFT reps on the committee are
In late February, the committee released an “Interim Report” on the status of our review thus far. The report began with a review of our existing Blue Cross plan. Blue Cross provides Peralta with three types of health benefit services in a single “one stop shop.” They provide our list of PPO doctors (PPO means “Preferred Provider Organization,” which is the Blue Cross “Prudent Buyer” network of doctors and hospitals). Second, Blue Cross administers our plan, paying our bills through their computer system. And third, they provide “stop-loss” insurance, which is an insurance policy that kicks in to cover our bills in situations where medical costs go over a pre-determined maximum cost to the District.
When we first discovered that other administrators were offering to administer plans like ours for about half the cost of Blue Cross’ administration (thus saving Peralta hundreds of thousands of dollars per year), we assumed we could simply switch to another administrator, but keep the Blue Cross stop-loss policy and Blue Cross’ Prudent Buyer Network. But Blue Cross refused, telling us that their “one stop shop” was “all or nothing.” If we wished to use Prudent Buyer doctors, we’d have to pay Blue Cross’ (inflated) administration costs.
Once we were told that Blue Cross would neither cut their administrative costs nor split up their services, our benefits broker (Michael Lamperd) was directed to look at other providers of those services. He contacted a dozen different health provider organizations, and none of them would even consider a plan like our Blue Cross plan. Essentially, they all said that our plan was “too rich” for “today’s market.”
After a lot of subsequent negotiations, our broker has brought back to the committee the best PPO deal that he can find on the health benefits market in the Bay Area.
At this point, the plan includes the following:
1. Deductible: $100/person/year, up to a maximum of $300/family/year
2. Office visit co-pay: $10/visit
3. Drug co-pay: $10 (generic); $20 (formulary brand drug); $30 (non-formulary brand drug)
4. Emergency Room co-pay: $50/visit
5. Co-Insurance: employee pays 10% of medical costs, after co-pays and deductibles, up to $1000 per person or $3000 per family per year
6. Increased “medical and pharmacy management” (ie, pre-admission authorization for hospitalizations or procedures)
7. Wellness Exams and immunization up to $150/person/year are not subject to deductibles or coinsurance
The committee is still looking at the plan, and there are a number of issues that still need to be resolved. But this looks like the basic outline.
How does all this affect Kaiser members? We expected that it wouldn’t. But, after talking and meeting with representatives from Kaiser on two occasions, it turned out that we were wrong. Kaiser is very concerned about “adverse selection” of its patients. In other words, if someone has diabetes and knows they will need lots of doctor visits, Kaiser thinks that they would be more likely to choose the Kaiser plan with no doctor visit co-pay than the alternative PPO with a $10/visit co-pay, plus a 10% coinsurance charge for each visit.
For that reason, Kaiser has always had in its contract with the District a clause requiring Kaiser co-pays be “no less favorable than any other healthcare plan available.” Based upon that clause, Kaiser has told us that they would match any office visit co-pays, pharmacy co-pays and emergency room co-pays in the PPO plan. So out-of-pocket expenses would also go up for Kaiser plan members, if we adopt a new PPO plan for the people presently on Blue Cross.
In summary, a new PPO plan to take the place of our existing Blue Cross plan will save Peralta money in at least four, and possibly five, ways:
1. Lower administrative costs;
2. Lower “stop loss” insurance costs;
3. Increases in Blue Cross user fees and costs (i.e., “cost shifting” to employees);
4. Increases in Kaiser user fees (i.e., “cost shifting” to employees, lowering Kaiser rates);
5. And (possibly) savings from “medical and pharmacy management.”
What work does the Benefits Committee still have to do? Here is a partial list:
1. Blue Cross has asserted that while their administrative costs may be double that of the competition, the negotiated costs for medical procedures and drugs under the Prudent Buyer plan is lower than the competition. We have asked for data on this issue.
2. Review specific proposals/plans for PPO “medical management” and “pharmacy management” to be sure that such plans will in no way limit our members from appropriate and necessary medical/pharmacy treatments.
3. We have hired a “medical actuary” to help with the issue of setting an “out-of-pocket maximum” for drug co-pays, especially for people who may also have run up high co-insurance co-pays.
4. Look at pharmacy providers, regarding which drugs are considered “formulary” and which are “non-formulary” brand name drugs.
5. Look closely at PPO provider lists (doctors, surgeons, hospitals, etc), to be sure that switching to a different provider group will give us comparable quality of physicians, specialists, hospitals and services, and achieve the (promised) 95%+ overlap for our members who are in the current Blue Cross plan. The proposed networks are Healthnet and Interplan.
6. Seriously look at the “portability” of an alternative PPO plan (compared to our Blue Cross PPO), from the perspective of retirees and employees who live or travel to other parts of the country or world on a regular basis.
7. Get better statistics from Blue Cross on current utilization, so we can have a better idea of the average cost of each of the plans to our members, and how those costs would be spread among the members (i.e., how many members would be hit with excessively high copays, how many would hit the co-insurance maximum, etc.). We may also get this information from the medical actuary.
One last point: the Health Benefits Committee is not negotiating your benefits. That is the job of the Negotiations Team, with direction from the
Once the Benefits Committee concludes that a specific plan is the best available, the process will move to the negotiating table and to Peralta’s political process. Will the membership, the
The more that PFT members participate in the bargaining process, by attending membership meetings, by attending the May 11th Board meeting, by expressing their concerns to Board members, by participating in the PAC, and by urging their colleagues to do likewise, the better the final outcome will be for us all.