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News
Your source on union-negotiated health care
benefits
Governor rejects new Ohio Med PPO administration
bids, extends MMO for one year
April 5, 2004
- On April 2, Governor Taft decided to reject all bids and start a new
re-bidding process to determine who will be administer the Ohio Med PPO
plan for state employees.
Instead, Medical Mutual of Ohio (MMO) will continue
to be the administrator for one additional year and the Joint Health Care
Committee (JHCC) has been asked to research the issues and repeat the
bidding process over the next 12 months to determine who the future administrator
will be.
The Joint Health Care Committee spent the last nine
months looking at various vendors and initially recommended that United
Health Care be selected.
Savings QUESTIONED
Initially, it appeared that a switch to UHC would save $28 million.
This was important to the JHCC because with OCSEA members’ share
of the health insurance premium going from 10 percent to 15 percent in
July of 2005, it was hoped that the savings would minimize how much extra
each member would have to pay.
Further review of UHC’s bid, unfortunately, revealed
that this discount was really much lower.
In addition, the JHCC only makes a recommendation. Ultimately
the governor and his staff can reject or accept that recommendation. With
the time running out, state officials said they felt compelled to repeat
the bidding process because they feared that there might be additional
reductions of UHC’s projected savings.
The initial recommendation to select UHC generated some
controversy among OCSEA members because it appeared that there would be
fewer doctors and hospitals available in some regions of the state (SE
and NW). It’s hoped that adding the additional year to the bidding
process will allow all potential vendors to address these network problems.
BACK TO WORK
The JHCC will begin a new bidding process for the Ohio Med TPA for
the benefit year that starts July 1, 2005. In the meantime, MMO will continue
to administer the Ohio Med PPO for the next benefit year.
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