Let School Boards Band Together To Buy Health Insurance (Courant Editorial)
March 9, 2010
In 2008, Virginia Seccombe, executive director of LEARN, a regional educational service center in Old Lyme, had what seemed like a sound idea. She proposed that school boards in her 25-town region band together to buy employee health insurance, on the theory that aggregate purchasing power would save money.
But she was advised that such a plan might be illegal. She initiated a chain of inquiry that eventually led to a June 18, 2008, letter from the state Insurance Department to the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities saying that without a specific statute allowing such an arrangement, its legal status was “unclear.”
At a time when regional cooperation is being urged on all sides to save money, this is a curious — and serious — anomaly.
Current state law allows that “two or more municipalities may jointly perform any function that each municipality may perform separately.” The ambiguity apparently is whether a school board is part of a municipality. State insurance regulations may also come into play, though some of these are so opaque that it is hard to tell.
In any event, legislators realized they needed to clarify the matter and specifically allow schools boards to jointly purchase health insurance, if they so desire. Unfortunately, a bill that would have achieved that goal was attached to the highly controversial “pooling” bill that would have allowed municipalities and small businesses to join the state’s health insurance plan. Gov. M. Jodi Rell vetoed this idea in 2008 and 2009.
So, two years after Ms. Seccombe raised the question, the issue is still on square one. With the state and most municipalities in dire fiscal circumstances, and regional insurance purchasing an opportunity for economy, this needs to be resolved, post-haste, with a stand-alone bill or rider that isn’t going to be rejected by the governor.
The General Assembly’s education committee has begun to prepare a bill. Rep. Tom Reynolds, a committee member and proponent, said the state “shouldn’t be the obstacle” to towns saving money. We couldn’t agree more.
Copyright © 2010, The Hartford Courant
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