September 13, 2012
There are an article in the CA yesterday morning that was interesting but not completely informative. The title of the article was “Annual survey finds health insurance cost rose, on average, 4 percent”
Well let me put some meat on the bones of the article. Following is the cost to local active MLGW, Memphis and Shelby County employees for their portion of annual health care.
Annual cost for health care for local public employees
Single active employee
MLGW- PPO plan 565 ea. @$1712.82 total annual cost to employee
Memphis- basic plan, @$1552.32 total annual cost to employee
Shelby Cty- HMO, @$1812.00 total annual cost to employee
Family active employee
MLGW- PPO plan 661 ea. @ $4661.58 total annual cost to employee
Memphis- basic plan, @$3295.48 total annual cost to employee
Shelby Cty- HMO, @ $3720.00 total annual cost to employee
Now the article goes on to state that individual policies purchased through an employer cost an average of $5615. I presume this is for an individual. Then it goes on to say that the average was $15,745 which I assume was for a family. There is no precision in the article but both of these figures are well above the local active employee cost.
We spend $131 million per year (paid by you the taxpayer) for local active health care and $70 million per year (paid by you the taxpayer) for retiree health care. This is over $200 million per year plus $281 million per year for pension payments. This is where the real money is and we need to address it and bring it back into equality with the private sector that pays for it all.