Huron County Health Department Retirees Upset By Huron County Health Insurance Oversight

What Goes Around Comes Around:

https://www.michigansthumb.com/news/article/huron-county-health-department-retiree-health-18584773.php

Health department retirees frustrated with county health insurance oversight
By Dominic Sevilla - January 3, 2024

Many Huron County Health Department retirees were in attendance for the last county meeting of the year to express their concerns over changes in their insurance.

The county had decided to cancel the original Blue Cross Blue Shield plan for county retirees, but the Municipal Employees Retirement System of Michigan was supposed to help smooth out the changeover to help retirees find comparable or better insurance.

"At the meeting held on Sept. 13 at the (Huron County) Expo Center with representatives from Mercer Marketplace *, MERS and Jodi from the commissioners' (office), we were given assurances that everything would move smoothly and we would be able to find health insurance that was equal to or better than our current coverage," Donna Witkovsky said at the meeting. "More importantly, during that meeting at the expo, we were told that deposits into our health care savings account held by MERS would be made in November and December, and our debit for the HCSP would be received during that time, so that we could get our insurance paid for."

Witkovsky is a retiree from the county health department. She told commissioners there was some time before anyone realized that Huron County Health Department retirees were missed during the changeover.

The retirees stayed to discuss the ongoing issue during the personnel committee meeting, which followed the commissioners meeting. During this discussion, Todd Talaski, county commissioner and chair of the personnel committee, said that this was not an intentional error.

"It was a mix-up, it certainly wasn't intentional here," Talaski said. "This was late in the year that this came up."

Talaski added that the issue has been resolved, though very late in the year, because the problem came up so late. Commissioner and committee member Mary Babcock said that the money to pay for the insurance premiums is now in the accounts.

When the policy was originally being changed, the county put together a list of county retirees that would be affected by this change. However, since the Huron County Health Department retirees were on a different insurance policy, they did not show up on the county's final list

Jodi Essenmacher, executive assistant for the Huron County Board of Commissioners, said that the courthouse sent its report to MERS on who would be receiving money, and that the health department would send its own report, as the courthouse doesn't have those records.

"When we were cutting a check for the courthouse group, we knew something was missing," Essenmacher said.

During the committee meeting several health department retirees spoke up wanting to know when and if they would be receiving the deposits to pay for healthcare premiums, adding that they were worried that they would not be able to pay for it out of pocket if the money did not come.

"So many of the retirees were petrified that they wouldn't have any insurance come Jan. 1, so they were pressured to pay (the premiums) when the documentation that we all retired under said that the county was going to pay for our health insurance premiums," Witkovsky said. "That's not happening as of this moment."

Additionally, the retirees after the committee meeting expressed frustrations over the lines of communication not only between themselves and MERS, but also between themselves and the county. Those in attendance said that they felt that, throughout the process, there was no follow-up on the change on the county side, with many of the health department retirees saying that they only heard about this change through word of mouth.

"We need to be proactive and find out what happened that our lines of communication dropped out," said Peggy Miller, a retiree from the health department. "I know there's been complaints that phone calls have been made to different people and phone calls have not been returned."

The commissioners at the committee meeting said that now that the money is in the MERS accounts for the retirees, debit cards are currently being issued. Though there was no guarantee of when the cards would arrive, the hope was the first week of the year. The commissioners added that if the debit cards were still not issued, they would try to escalate it and ask for them to be expedited by MERS.

* Mercer Marketplace 365 is a unit of Mercer (US) LLC, which is in turn a unit of Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc.