County switches administrators months into new insurance setup
Change comes months into new setup
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MORGANTOWN - Citing a lack of customer support, the Monongalia County Commission has dropped Take Command Health as its insurance administrator in favor of Remodel Health.
The move comes less than a year after the commission took the dramatic, and somewhat unpopular, step to move the county away from group health insurance coverage in favor of an Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Agreement, or ICHRA, with Take Command Health serving as the county's administrator.
The commission pointed to skyrocketing insurance costs as the primary motivation.
The move to ICHRA decoupled the county’s overall insurance spend from its group history, which was driving steep increases year over year. Embedded within the group plan concept is the inevitability that a small percentage of plan members will push costs up for everyone.
Through the ICHRA setup, the commission provides each employee an allowance based on age, insured family and other factors. Each employee then works individually with the administrator to shop from available plans.
Commissioner Sean Sikora said that while some "bumps and bruises" were anticipated, the transition, which was already unpopular with some employees, was made more difficult by the fact that Take Command failed to consistently provide the robust customer support needed under the ICHRA format.
"These are things that we said in the beginning, when we went to an ICHRA, that we were going to monitor this, and if we needed to make changes, we needed to make changes. We weren’t just going down the road and starting the process saying, 'Well, this is the way it is,'” he said. "We're not accepting that. We've been evaluating, and the office has taken on a lot of work where our provider, previous provider, has failed. We've taken on a lot of work to make sure that things run smoothly."
The move to Remodel Health is effective Oct. 1.
Sikora said he expects county employees to experience a "much more customer service-focused, robust enrollment process" when enrollment opens in November.
Later in the meeting, while discussing a separate topic, Sikora offered more insight on the commission's deliberative process.
"I was talking earlier about our health insurance. We made a decision that we got destroyed on for months, for months, by our employees, and every little thing that went wrong was magnified," he said. "But we made a decision that we thought was in the best interest of our citizens, as far as the taxpayers paying for those healthcare costs, and our employees. We'll admit where we fell short, and we'll work on fixing it."