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Townships discuss health benefits at COG

WARREN — Representatives of a smaller township asked the Trumbull County Council of Governments to consider asking the county commissioners to allow themselves and other similarly-sized townships to join countywide health benefits.

Southington trustee Charles Hagman, who attended the meeting alongside fellow trustee Cindy Speaker, explained to other representatives Wednesday that as things are now, there was no “economy of scale” for the township to join on their own.

“We’d be able to pay, we’d be able to grow; we only have two full-time employees,” Hagman said.

COG president and Vienna Trustee Phil Pegg said the topic had come up previously to the Youngstown / Warren Regional Chamber, who had a “whole list” of insurance agents for county-wide benefits. However, Pegg said Howland Trustee James LaPolla, a former COG chairman, pointed out issues with the arrangement.

“One of Dr. LaPolla’s things was ‘man, this sounds good.’ Where the problem comes in is the differences between the townships and villages,” Pegg said. “With the ages of the participants, it’s going to vary a great, great deal, from one entity to the next.”

Pegg said they asked if they could join the chamber because they had insurance for small business, but they were rejected.

Pegg said Vienna changed the township’s insurance provider a year ago, which allowed them to save nearly 7%. If they had stayed with their previous provider, the increase would have been 18%.

Warren Township Trustee Edward Anthony said they had a meeting with a woman who does insurance for local governments, and was upfront about it.

“She did some checking and she came back two days later and said they wouldn’t be able to do it; sort of like what Phil’s saying, and the big thing was it really wasn’t so much the villages and the townships combined, or even cities,” Anthony said. “The big thing was the employees, the condition of the employees.”

Anthony said some of the townships have what they called “high-risk employees.”

“That’s why the county won’t do it, because the simple fact of it is that if everybody was healthy or on an equal plane, it’d be good,” he said. “But she said there’s no way the county would entertain that; that was October of this past year.”

Anthony said they faced a similar rate to what Pegg said Vienna avoided by switching providers to Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, but they finally got it down to 11.9%.

Pegg said he felt that what really helped them was having several insurance brokers come in and make presentations to trustees one after another.

“They got to see each other and they knew we were shopping,” Pegg said. “I really think that by having three different brokers come in and make their pitches, it got it down and we got exactly what we had and saved money.”

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