Insurance Issues
By PJ Martin
Editor
The Herald-News
The Metcalfe County fiscal court met in regular session last Thursday, April 11th with all magistrates in attendance.
The agenda was amended to include the Center sidewalks and approved. The minutes from the March 28th meeting were also approved with no changes.
The approval was given for Emergency Management Director Adam Bennett to be the Flood Plain Coordinator.
A vote was held to allow the payment of invoices received for the Bowling Park Food Pantry Project up to the bid amount. The vote was 4-0 and it was explained that grant funds are there and once an invoice arrives Treasurer Page Edwards has only 5 days to process it.
The proposed jail budget was presented for Fiscal Year 24-25 as $445,300 and a budget transfer of $80,000 for the current jail fund. Magistrate Daniel Bragg asked, “Will that be enough?” referring to the current jail costs and Edwards answered, “I just got another bill yesterday for March and it’s gone back up to $25,000.”
The magistrates approved advertising for bids on the Center sidewalk work.
The county employee health insurance renews with the fiscal year on July 1st and the current insurance is with KACO who sent an updated price list for Anthem noting the deductible stayed at $5,000 but the out-of-pocket increased to $6400. Employees still cannot cover their families on this plan.
Jailer Randall Shive said, “I’d like for you to check into some more companies or something, because what I’ve got’s not worth 15 cents.”
“We go through KACO, because Humana’s getting out of the health care business,” explained Edwards.
Shive said, “There’s a lot more companies out there than KACO. I believe we could get better insurance for less money…There’s a lot more employees that are not happy with it either, they’re just not here to speak up…I think we need to check into some different insurance, to see what it is.”
It was noted that some of the employees have dropped the insurance and others are paying out of pocket for health care.
Shive stated that he’s not allowed to use a medication discount card with this insurance, because they say they’ve already discounted it. He gave an example, his medication with a discount card is around $80, but with the KACO insurance, it costs him over $200 more.
“My pharmacist told me we had the worst insurance of any state, county, or school employee that she’d ever seen,” announced Shive.
“Can we put out for bids on our insurance?” asked Bragg. No one was sure.
Judge/Executive Larry Wilson advised that a special called meeting could be held so other insurance providers could be invited to present their policy options.
Other Items
Solid Waste Coordinator Scotty Mosby is scheduled to resign in June and is in the process of training Kim Jandt, his replacement.
This session of the Metcalfe County Fiscal Court can be viewed on their Facebook page at Metcalfe https://www.facebook.com/metcalfecountyfiscalcourt.
