Warren city workers seek health-coverage changes

By Ed Runyan

WARREN — The city’s health- insurance costs were expected to rise 21.5 percent, or about $1 million, in 2009 and cost more than $6 million.

If the city doesn’t change its health-care plan in 2010, it will rise 22 percent again, or $650,000, Gary Cicero, the city’s human resources director told city council recently.

A group of Warren employees had a news conference Friday at the Central Fire Station on South Street to say that they agree those costs are too high, but they’d like to be involved in the process of bringing them down.

“We want to create a comprehensive plan and bid it out. Unfortunately, we’ve gotten nowhere with that,” said Chuck Eggleston, a firefighter and chairman of a committee of employees that formed in June to address health-care costs.

Eggleston said he doesn’t believe the city administration ever wanted to create the insurance committee because it doesn’t want to work cooperatively with employees.

After creating the committee, the city has tried to ignore it in hopes it would go away, Eggleston said.

“I believe [the city administration] wants to keep us in the dark. The less we know, the more they can take advantage of us,” he said.

Warren’s health-care plan includes no wellness program, no performance standards, no health screenings, no health education to keep costs down, Eggleston said.

It’s no wonder that the city says its health-care costs are rising so rapidly, Eggleston said.

Cicero, meanwhile, says there is a contractual roadblock preventing the city from bidding out its health- care plan at this time: Union contracts in the city dictate that workers get what is known as “first-dollar” coverage, meaning that the insurance pays the first dollar of the bill, with the employee paying nothing.

Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield is the only company that still offers that type of coverage, so there is no point in bidding out the health care, Cicero said.

During negotiations this winter, the city will ask employees to change that, Cicero said.

Eggleston and others on the health-care committee said they don’t have a problem with losing “first-dollar” coverage.

They just want the city to begin now to look at ways to reduce health-care costs so that the $650,000 in savings the city says it needs to balance the budget can be made in the best way possible.

In a memo handed out at the news conference, the committee said the city has used the same Youngstown-based insurance broker for 26 years, and the broker’s family has made thousands of campaign contributions to Mayor Michael O’Brien in recent years.

“We feel there is a conflict of interest with the current broker due to the fact that he and several of his relatives are frequent and generous contributors to the mayor’s campaigns,” the memo said.

O’Brien, when asked about the accusation, said Jeff Rossi has contributed $620 to his campaigns in the past seven years, that Rossi’s reputation is “impeccable,” that he has known Rossi and his family since he was in high school and that Rossi family contributions “had nothing to do with business.”

He added: “It’s ridiculous for anyone who knows Jeff Rossi to come close to that assumption.”

runyan@vindy.com