Great news for taxpayers, as Baylor Scott White held the line on health insurance costs for City employees. I’m pretty sure this happened last year as well.
Weird, because BEFORE that, the City got jammed with massive increases almost yearly and nobody seemed to care (they saw an 11.8% increase in 2014/2015 – then they saw a 13% increase in 2017/2018).
Then in April 2020, I started asking uncomfortable questions. I asked if we ever looked around for better insurance. I asked for data going back ten years on City employee health insurance claims and why they had DOUBLED in one year! I fought with City attorney JC “Stonewall” Brown in order to get access to that data – data that City Finance Director Moreno had ALREADY talked about in the press.
Come to think of it, I never DID get all that information. JC Brown (and by extension, Mayor “Transparency” Talbert) was a huge pain in the ass in denying me much of the info, saying:
“as a courtesy to you, the staff searched for data and asked that I provide you with the limited information that remained available to the staff. I provided that to you via my correspondence dated March 23rd. No additional data will be provided“
This is the attorney that bills the City about $7,000 every month for various little projects, btw – talking to me about doing me courtesies.
Bottom line is that a lot of info was requested of BSW about claims amounts and how premiums are set. Lo and behold! That very same year BSW decides to hold premiums unchanged…then they did it again this year!
It’s almost as if somebody over there realized “uh oh, these guys are starting to realize they are being bent over by us.”
You know what ELSE is funny? Last year was supposedly a deadly pandemic year. I remember Rhonda Witcher clutching her pearls in the Radiogram about how “hospitals were being overrun!” and I remember a tearful Mayor Transparency Talbert crying on Facebook when she caught it herself. I remember daily tearful counting of every person who passed away – including many in their 80s and 90s who actually lived in a nursing home two counties over.
The City has 110 full-time employees – many of them older and very out of shape. According to the non-stop wailing about “the deadly pandemic”, we should have seen more than a few City employees in the hospital and the ICU with Covid – racking up HUGE medical bills, right?
In short, Covid was a perfect excuse to jack health premiums through the roof – as an ACTUAL reaction to the giant hospital bills the City employees were surely running up during the “pandemic”. We should have seen at least one or two City employees drop dead of Covid too, statistically.
Yet none of that happened.
That’s because the math doesn’t lie. I know two people in the insurance industry, both with 25 years of experience – and BOTH of them told me that life insurance premiums have not reacted at all to the “deadly pandemic” last year. All the wailing and gnashing of teeth and kids in masks and morons keeping their kids out of school was ALL FOR NOTHING. The insurance numbers prove it unequivocally.