Porter Proposes Self-Funded Medical Insurance

Putnam County Mayor Randy Porter would like county commissioners to consider self-funded medical insurance for the county.

Porter said the county has three options as it braces for an estimated 10-percent increase in insurance this year.

“One is stay where we’re at with Blue Cross and continue on with whatever increase that they have,” Porter said. “The second one would be to go with the state plan or go self-funded. I’m studying all three of those options to see how it works out.”

Porter said self-funded insurance would involve hiring a third party to process claims for the whole year.

“We would pay them so much per person to do the claims for a whole year,” Porter said. “We would then have reinsurance that would kick in to protect the county. We would have it on a per claim basis where once a claim reached $75,000 or a $100,000 the reinsurance would automatically pick it up and pay for anything after that.”

Porter said the county would also have an aggregate policy of reinsurance. He said that policy would pick up everything once the county pays out a certain level of claims. For example, if the county reached $5 million in claims, the aggregate policy would cover everything after that point.

Porter said the county could have saved $1.8 million had it been self-funded over the past five years.

“Our medical insurance runs July through June and we’ll start doing open enrollment in May,” Porter said. “You’ll (county commission) have to make a decision in probably April about what we want to do.”

Porter made the self-funded medical insurance proposal during Monday’s Fiscal Review Committee meeting. He said self-funded medical insurance would not involve any specific changes to employee coverage or benefits.