Freeman Wants to Expand State Insurance Fund For Medical Insurance

Whether you support or oppose Obamacare, I think just about everyone agrees that health insurance has simply become unaffordable. It's one of the biggest line items in both municipal and private sector budgets, and the costs just keep rising as hospitals multiply.

State Rep. Bob Freeman, D-Northampton, has introduced legislation that would make health insurance more affordable for Pennsylvanians by permitting the State Workers’ Insurance Fund to sell health insurance.

The State Workers' Insurance Fund provides a workers' compensation program for Pennsylvania businesses unable access workers' comp insurance in the private sector. It is only permitted to sell workers' compensation insurance. Freeman's bill would expand its offerings to include health insurance.

"[I]t would make a quality insurance product available to Pennsylvanians at a lower cost than current rates because of its lower administrative overhead, and it would create more competition within the health insurance market," Freeman said. "In addition, by making this available in the market, it would serve as a yardstick by which to measure the fairness of rates charged by private health insurance companies."

Freeman said this would be paid for with premiums to health care subscribers and a loan from the SWIF fund, which would be paid back.

His bill was just introduced yesterday, but has attracted four co-sponsors.

NorCo Did Not Seek Gap Insurance Until October

In late October, when Executive John Brown finally decided to offer gap insurance to the Northampton County workforce, he stated that "Cathy Allen's been working on this since July." This was an attempt on his part to make it look as though he and Allen were trying to do the right thing for employees all along. That's nice, but it appears that his statement is untrue.

I have filed a Right-to-Know for all emails exchanged between the County and cost control consultant C3, relating to the health plan being offered to employees. The County has refused to produce any of the 141 emails, claiming they are all exempt. At my request, the Office of Open Records ordered the County to produce them all for an in camera inspection by the hearing officer. What this means is that the hearing officer will examine them in private, and then rule.

Though the County initially considered refusing to obey this order, it finally decided to do so on Friday. Accompanying the emails is an index, describing each one. That index was sent to me.

Her July emails show her discussing "strategy" on the changes being made, which I translate to mean how best to break the bad news to the County employees.

There are no discussions concerning gap insurance at all until October 14. By this time, it had become very clear that the health plan reductions were universally unpopular among employees, and they were appearing at meetings in large numbers. Allen did not work herself, merely serving as a pass through. She provided C3 with an employee roster so that the cost consultant could get quotes for gap insurance. She got an answer from C3 on October 30, and that's when brown made his announcement to Council.

It is also pretty clear that neither Brown nor Allen was very familiar with gap insurance. C3 had to send an instructional video on November 3, after Brown had described it to Council.

So when Brown told Council that Allen had been working on gap insurance since July, he misled them. She had been working on the matter for only two weeks. I'll assume that he was trying to be honest and did not intentionally mislead Council, but he did mislead them. Also, he explained gap insurance without a real understanding of it.