MORGANTOWN — One of the state’s congressional candidates is also a PEIA recipient, and she has a lot to say on the future of the much-maligned healthcare program.
Kendra Fershee, a professor in WVU’s College of Law and the Democratic candidate in West Virginia’s 1st Congressional District, told WAJR’s “Morgantown AM” she and other state employees pay for their health care treatment in seven ways.
“We pay premiums, we pay co-pays, we pay deductibles, and then my employer also pays part of all of those. I pay for prescriptions. I pay for Medicaid and Medicare. We’re all paying into a system that is very, very expensive, and we’re not getting good care. Our health isn’t benefiting from it. I want efficiency in the system.”
Cost hikes for the state’s insurance program were a large component of the nine-day work stoppage for teachers and service personnel that ended in March. Fershee cited concerns about Gov. Jim Justice’s recently proposed solution to PEIA.
During the state Department of Education’s Summit for Educational Excellence in Morgantown, Justice suggested spouses of West Virginia educators earning more than $150,000 be removed from PEIA and made to pay their own insurance.
“It seems strange to me because I would think that the group of people that would be kicked off PEIA would be pretty small,” Fershee said.
She is opposing Republican incumbent David McKinley in the November midterm election. Their district includes Barbour, Brooke, Doddridge, Gilmer, Grant, Hancock, Harrison, Marion, Marshall, Mineral, Monongalia, Ohio, Pleasants, Preston, Ritchie, Taylor, Tucker, Tyler, Wetzel, and Wood counties.
Fershee advocates for universal health care.
“We talk so much about insurance that we’re not talking about health, and what I would like to do is have a system that incentivizes health instead of paying insurance companies’ huge administrative costs and wastes in that system,” she said.
Fershee said she recently discussed the topic with her physical therapist, who said he could go into a fourth-grade classroom to teach kids how to properly stand and thus help them avoid years of future back, spine and knee problems.
“We don’t really know how to be healthy because our incentives are all wrong,” Fershee said. “I said, ‘Well, why can’t you go into those fourth-grade classrooms,’ and he said, ‘I’m not allowed to because that’s treating kids’ health in a way that our insurance structure doesn’t allow and our medical structure doesn’t allow.’
“But I think we need to be moving in the direction of universal health care and there are incremental ways we can move in from how children and seniors are covered. We can keep moving in toward the center so people get covered more and more each year. That can be done legislatively, and it needs to be done in Congress.”
And for those asking how it would be paid
for, Fershee said, “We already are.”
“If somebody goes to the emergency room with a severe medical need, or even maybe not a severe medical need, we treat them and then the government pays for it, and that’s expensive because the emergency room sets the cost,” she said.
Morgantown Area News
'Thursday, April 25, 2024'
