Board of Aldermen 3-31-2020 Page 3
in taking temperature readings from thousands and thousands of people across the country demonstrates
that the social distancing is reducing the overall level of fever, meaning the overall level of Coronavirus and
Flu, both. So all of the efforts that we are undertaking here really are having an effect.
We are definitely going to see more cases grow and we will see the numbers grow in Nashua but not nearly
what they would have been if everybody hadn’t been working so hard. So that will continue. We have
multiple conference calls everyday on various aspects of what we are doing. Everybody, as you know, is
working remotely. And again | want to thank the people who put this meeting together. Bruce Codagnone
and everybody from IT who are enabling us to meet in this fashion.
It is good to see you all, even though it is remotely, | see Alderman O’Brien smiling as usual, so it is nice to at
least have this level of contact. | could go on with more detail but | think you all understand pretty well what is
going on and so | will get to the subject at hand which is the proposed changes to the plan design which we
have put forward in order to encourage people to move to the high deductible plan and will save both
employees and the City considerable money if we undertake this change.
| have talked with you a little bit about the details in the past, but rather than getting into the details now, | will
turn it over to Ms. Kleiner and Mr. Budreau who will fill you in with slides and other information to give you all
of the detail regarding what is before you. So thank you, Madam President, and again | think everybody
should be very proud of our City Employees. | didn’t mention yet our First Responders, Fire and Police
Departments, they are both very involved in trying to keep the community safe as well. So again, thanks to
everybody and | will sign off.
President Wilshire
Thank you, Mayor, and just know that this Board does appreciate everything you are doing and everyone, all
the City employees, so thank you for all that. OK, Director Kleiner and Director Budreau? Who is going to be
up first?
Kim Kleiner, Director of Administrative Services
Good evening President Wilshire, Members of the Board. | am Director Kim Kleiner, and | am going to be
joined by Director Larry Budreau shortly. So we prepared a presentation for you that | believe was delivered
to the Board vie e-mail earlier today. It is hard for me to tell from here if you can see it or not so | will a nod as
yes.
So the first slide is current challenges, so this slide should not be new to the Board. This was actually a slide
that was shared with you back in December. We wanted to show you the actual spend when we talk about
benefits for City Employees. Quite often we hear and we think about healthcare and what our healthcare
claims costing but to have a rich benefits program like the City offers to its employees, it is much more than
just health claims.
This spend, as you look at it and you look at the increase over several years, really relates to the whole fund.
So there are costs to having benefit employees who administer the plan. There is cost for our stop loss, there
is cost for the dental which we often don’t talk about as much as we talk about Anthem and the medical
claims. There are all types of costs. So this is inclusive of all of that which is different than just looking at
healthcare claims.
The next slide, we wanted to show was an internal exercise that we did in turn. So last fall, the Mayor had
asked us, “how do we know that the HAS is saving the City money”. And it is a fair question, we put it out to
WBS our Healthcare Consultant. They prepared an analysis which you will see in a couple of slides down.
But we went back and we started the data here as well. And when | say “we” there has been a group of us
that have been involved in preparing this recommendation for the Mayor. It has been Human Resources and
our Benefits Team. It has been several members from Financial Services including CFO Griffin. It has been
