Video Courtesy USD 489 News
By JAMES BELL
Hays Post
The Hays USD 489 Board of Education heard from two potential consultants at Monday night’s board meeting as they continue evaluating staying with the state insurance plan.
The board first heard from Julie Yarmer from Freedom Claims Management.
She informed the board she would be hands-on with the board to pull information together to seek alternatives to the state plan.
Yarmer is also a consultant for the city of Hays.
In response to Lance Bickle, board president, informing Yarmer that information about claims is not available to the board in order to obtain other quotes, she said she works directly with carriers and could get accurate quotes.
“We would be able to get firm numbers from carriers, even though we can’t get the claims utilization,” she said, adding that in a perfect world having that information would be helpful.
She also told the board that, if hired, she would look at other types of insurance funding that could help cut costs, including partially self-funding.
The fee for Yarmer’s services is $15,000, which would take the board through the evaluation to transition to the new plan.
Scott Sachse and Jon Roberts from McInnes Group presented the board a radically different plan that would be substantially more expensive, but also might offer significantly larger cost savings.
“We try to take the guess work out of your renewal,” Sachse said, telling the board the group uses in-house analytics to try to project what rates should be.
He informed the board that without being able to shop the market, the board has no realistic idea of what the district’s insurance rate should be.
With an average staff age of 44 years old, Sachse said the rate appears to be higher than expected, warning USD 489 seems to “subsidizing this pool instead of being subsidized.”
“We think there are real savings here,” Sachse said.
While he informed the board that he cannot guarantee cost savings, he said without collecting information, it is impossible to know if the rate they have is either too high or too low.
“You kind of have to rip this Band-Aid off,” Sachse said, and find out what the rate should be through data collection.
The way around the lack of claims information, Sachse said, is to collect data from staff directly. By doing so, the district could then shop for a more competitive plan.
But doing so is significantly more expensive, with Sachse telling the board that service from his group would cost $52,000.
Spending that amount without a guarantee of cost savings did not sit well with board member Josh Waddell, who questioned Sachse about spending a large amount of money without a specific amount of savings being offered.
“It’s not real comforting to hear that were going to spend $52,000 to find out we have a competitive plan,” Waddell said.
“There’s no way of doing this without some sort of a leap of faith,” Sachse said.
He also informed the board they could provide a list of quotes, but without the data, no insurance company or independent agent could provide a real benefit to the district.
“That’s wasting your time,” Sachse said.
The board took no action on the proposals during the meeting and will now evaluate options in the upcoming months.
The renew deadline for the current state plan is Oct. 1.