University Times

Faculty and staff will gain a new health insurance option in 1995 but lose another.

Beginning Jan. 1, Pitt will cease offering employees the option of Traditional Blue Cross/Blue Shield coverage but will add a new Blue Cross plan called Select Blue. The move is expected to save Pitt $1.1 million to $2.3 million in insurance premiums next year, according to Pitt's Medical Insurance Review Committee, a group of administrators, faculty and staff that recommended the change.

The committee concluded that the approximately 2,300 Pitt employees currently enrolled in the Traditional Blue Cross plan aren't likely to lose much, if any, coverage or flexibility by switching to one of the remaining plans.

Herb Chesler, a faculty representative on the committee, said Blue Cross is trying to phase out its Traditional plan and has been anxious to get Pitt to drop it.

In exchange for Pitt dropping the Traditional plan, he said, Blue Cross pledged not to increase the University's premiums in 1995 and to hold increases to 5-7 percent during the ensuing several years for the four remaining Blue Cross-affiliated plans offered at Pitt — Comprehensive Blue Cross, Select Blue, the University Health Network and Keystone West.

Pitt's fifth remaining health insurance option, HealthAmerica, is not affiliated with Blue Cross.

Chesler said that, at one point, the Medical Insurance Review Committee considered recommending that Pitt keep the Traditional plan because it would have been the only health insurance option here that did not include some element of managed care. Employees who chose to remain in the Traditional plan would have had to pay the difference between this year's rates and next year's.

But retaining the Traditional plan would have meant that Pitt's Blue Cross premiums would have gone up by at least $1.1 million next year, with employees' share of premium increases ranging from $408 to $888 per person in 1995, Chesler said.

Faced with those increases, the committee decided to recommend dropping the Traditional plan. Pitt senior administrators are expected to give final approval to the move.

Staff Association Council President Darlene Harris, who served on the Medical Insurance Review Committee, said at SAC's Oct. 12 meeting that Pitt's Human Resources office will send a memorandum to employees soon explaining the change. Also, Human Resources will offer workshops to help people now enrolled in the Traditional plan choose among the alternative plans.

Faculty Assembly at its Oct. 4 meeting endorsed eliminating the Traditional plan and adding Select Blue. SAC, at its meeting yesterday, did not vote on the change, but SAC President Harris announced details of it.

At the Oct. 11 Senate Council meeting, Council member Phil Wion recommended that any money that Pitt saves by dropping Traditional Blue Cross be plowed back into employee benefits. But Chancellor J. Dennis O'Connor and Provost James Maher argued that earmarking savings that way would be contrary to the University's Planning and Budgeting System (PBS), through which funds are supposed to be redistributed to meet high-priority institutional goals. Some of the money saved by dropping the Traditional plan may go to offset employee benefits costs, O'Connor said, "but I would be loath to mandate that it all should be." Wion replied that he was not recommending that PBS be bypassed, only that his proposal be considered under the process. Wion pointed out that he helped to draft the PBS system, which was adopted soon after O'Connor became chancellor in 1991.

— Bruce Steele