Risk & Business Magazine CEO/CFO Business Today Magazine | Page 6

CEBCO COUNTY EMPLOYEE BENEFITS CONSORTIUM OF OHIO LOWERING THE HEAVY COST OF HEALTH AND WELLNESS W ith the rapidly changing landscape that healthcare has experienced in the last few years, it should come as no surprise that many municipalities, including those in Ohio, have had difficulty dealing with the oft- unpredictable increases in rates year over year. With that in mind, in April 2001, the Ashtabula County Commissioners began investigating the possibility of forming their own health insurance program. Those efforts eventually culminated in the creation of CEBCO, the County Employee Benefits Consortium of Ohio. CEBCO is, at its core, a means of pooling risk for the members who are invested in it. If one county, for example, were to offer a healthcare program and no others did, all of that risk would fall on its shoulders alone. By standing together as a consortium, the member counties are able to take that burden on all of their collective shoulders, alleviating a lot of the risk and making the program much more sustainable and economically viable moving into the future. Since its inception, it has done just that. 6 So how does it all work? Well, to begin with, when it comes to providing employee benefits, there are a couple of options: self- funded or fully insured. Self-funding is the method that CEBCO operates under, which adds a significant level of predictability in cost for the member counties. The counties have a “pool point” based on their size, and the claims attributed to each member only count for rating purposes if they are below the pooling point. Any that go beyond that are handled by a larger pool consisting of all of the counties involved. This helps protect individual members from larger claims than they could otherwise handle while also allowing for the management of small claims through the implementation of health and wellness programs. So where do the savings go in this system? Right back into the community, for the most part. In the words of Lenny Eliason, the current President of the Athens County Commissioners, “keeping a close watch on health care expenses allows for the Board of Commissioners to allocate the savings we have gained over the years to other capital projects and economic development initiatives.” In the 14 years since the creation of CEBCO, the average cost increase of health care premiums has been 5.5 percent below the current health care trends nationwide. That, in and of itself, is evidence of the efficacy of such a program. The way that the costs are being controlled, however, is the real key. Through the creation of wellness programming, people are becoming healthier, catching unknown issues sooner, and (possibly best of all) controlling their own spending in the program. It’s a win not just for the municipalities themselves but also for everyone working in them. + BY: LENNY ELIASON PRESIDENT, ATHENS COUNTY [email protected]