Washington’s health insurance system has abandoned many of our public schools’ most dedicated, yet lowest-wage-earning employees, including secretaries, bus drivers and cafeteria workers.
My husband and I have worked for the Bethel School District for many years. Soon, my husband will take military leave from his full-time school maintenance job and deploy to Afghanistan. He enlisted in the Washington National Guard so that we could get better insurance benefits for our family. Even our combined school wages and benefits are not enough to adequately cover our family.
Like many working families, our cost of health insurance has grown so expensive that most of the money we earn goes to pay for insurance premiums and never ends up in take-home pay.
I know of some workers who have no paycheck to cash after benefits are deducted from their monthly wages. A few actually write their employers a check every month to pay for their insurance! Many others who qualify for benefits are the working poor who can’t afford health insurance for themselves or their families. They go without, or look to a government-subsidized program for help.
Not only is this system unfair to school employees like me, it’s also unnecessarily costly to taxpayers.
Currently, each of Washington’s 295 local school districts designs its own benefit plans for teachers and school workers. The result is a patchwork of 1,000 employee insurance pools and 200 medical plans offered by 10 different insurance companies. How crazy is this?
What’s worse is that a private insurance monopoly eliminates competition in the insurance market that could increase options and help keep rates more stable and affordable.
In contrast, most state government employees benefit from a statewide health insurance pool, which drives down the administrative costs because of the large number of members. Virtually all K-12 education employees are left out of this system.
Further, school workers like me are not treated the same as teachers or other public employees when it comes to health insurance due to our hourly, part-time status. For instance, higher-paid state agency employees who work half time qualify for full benefits. Without that full-time status, many school workers are responsible for covering 100 percent of their health insurance costs.
The system is broken and needs to be reformed now.
In a recent report, state Auditor Brian Sonntag estimated the state could save $90 million by consolidating and streamlining the insurance system for 100,000 public school employees. For a state facing ongoing billion-dollar budget deficits, this would be a considerable savings.
Lawmakers in Olympia are starting to take notice. In response to the auditor’s report, the Legislature directed the state Health Care Authority to determine the costs and benefits of creating a unified, health insurance system for education staff similar to other public workers. A final report will be presented to lawmakers in December for action in the 2012 session.
It’s not reasonable to pay school workers an average of $26,000 per year and expect them to spend $12,000 to $15,000 to cover their health insurance. But that’s what many workers do. They have no other choice.
With the start of another school year, employees will likely see their health insurance costs go up again. But the state budget crisis means there’s no money to help school employees keep up with rising premium increases.
Without reform, we run the risk of thousands more of dedicated bus drivers, health room aides and school security officers looking towards the government for assistance, placing even more of a strain on the social safety net. That’s an unfair expectation to put on employees who are so critical to making our schools run smoothly.
Public school employees like me support reforming the K-12 insurance system because we believe it will result in a system that is fair to all education employees, is more efficient and costs the taxpayers less money.
Nicole Flournoy works as a health-room aide for the Bethel School District.
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