Board of Aldermen 3-31-2020 Page 7
If you drop down to the bottom of the slide for a moment to two people stopped by and asked a couple of
questions and we felt that their inquiries were successfully responded to. On March 12" earlier that afternoon
before the open house, Mayor Donchess led a meeting and spoke at some length explaining the pressures
on this year’s budget and the pressures that healthcare costs had been adding to the budget particularly in
the last couple of years with about a $6.3 million dollar increase to cost over two years | believe. And he let
people know that he intended to submit this Legislation to change the — primarily the deductibles in the Health
Maintenance Organization, that’s obviously the big change. As Ms. Kleiner just said, not as an effort to
impose those deductibles on people which do shift costs but rather to encourage them to move en masse to
the Health Savings Account Plan. That meetings also was cordial and a couple questions were asked and as
| had mentioned earlier, one of the questions led directly to a change in the proposal before it was finalized.
Thank you, Kim, next slide please.
Kim Kleiner, Admin. Services Director
So a number of years back 2014 Governs Magazine had actually done a study, it is certainly not the only
study that has been out there, you know, healthcare challenges, the cost of healthcare, is a challenge both in
municipalities and in private industry. There’s been a number of studies but Governance Magazine’s study
was specifically around municipalities and how do we look at these increasing costs of healthcare? And they
went through a number of steps; we did review that. We realized that plan design by itself is not going to
solve our healthcare cost problem. It takes many measures to make that happen and it can’t be done ina
one-year period, this is a process that the City has to embark on and we need the employees and the
employer boards and everyone to buy into this. But these are some additional measures that we started back
in the fall.
So WBS, Workplace Benefit Solutions, our Healthcare Consultant has been extremely helpful and has been
out to our Divisions, Public Health, Public Works. They have also gone to the Teacher’s Union and had
sessions at City Hall talking to people about healthcare costs and how they can manage healthcare costs and
how we should look at that and how it benefits everyone, both our employees and the employer. Walking
them through the high deductible health plan and the Health Savings Account.
Employee education is a very large piece to solving this problem. We will continue to work with Workplace
Benefits Solutions on further education, on some creative videos. We have been having conversations with
the School District on ways we can engage their workforce which is more difficult when you have 17 schools
throughout a district. But we are very devoted to building our employee education.
Wellness and Alternative Resources — so we are going to continue to look at options that Anthem has as well
as to pools that Workplace Benefit Solution has in their wheelset, whether it is things like telehealth, which
right now is waiving all costs to our subscribers during the next 3 months because of the COVID 19 event.
Whether it is Smart Shopper or Sidney Care or our Employee Assistance Program. We are going to look at
new and creative ways and offer as many programs as we can to benefit our employees. Another solution
that was highlighted was doing a dependent mirror audit. This is important, we realize that day to day as you
are doing open enrollments and you are busy, employees may forget that either in 4 months when a divorce
takes place or to remove a child that is no longer a dependent, one thing we do have in place with Anthem is
they do automatically alert as our dependents are about to hit the 26 year old cutoff. So we feel we are very
good on that, we have very good control systems put in place, but we are committed to do a full dependent
audit next year, during Fiscal 21.
Data upgrades — we just signed a contract with a consultant, Clear Sky, we are working with our Information
Technology Department to build data feeds that will update between our Lawson, HR System and the
Anthem system. Currently there is a lot of transfer of benefit information that is still manually done and we
are looking to improve that efficiency and productivity and we hope to have these data feeds built in time for
open enrollment this year.
