CHARLESTON, W.Va. — State lawmakers are going to see a bill this session that state Public Employees Insurance Agency Executive Director Ted Cheatham believes will make it easier to implement changes in the health insurance program for state workers.
The 2018-2019 plan that begins next July includes grouping state workers in five salary tiers to determine their monthly insurance premiums. Cheatham said PEIA will ask lawmakers to allow the agency to seek the information from the state tax department instead of employees themselves.
“So I could go to tax department and I could say, ‘Here’s Ted Cheatham’s social security number–would you please tell me which of these five boxes he belongs in for total family income. Not how much it is, just he belongs in this salary box.’ I believe we could take 80 percent of our work out. It solves audit problems, honesty problems, all of the paper problems,” Cheatham said.
Without the bypass to the tax department, Cheatham fears it may be more difficult to get accurate income information.
“We’re going put together a sheet that is a checkbox sheet that can be scanned and read electronically,” Cheatham said. “If nobody wants to tell us what their spouse makes or tell us what tier they’re in they will be defaulted to the highest salary tier.”
The PEIA Finance Board decided in December on a number of changes for the new plan year including cutting the current 10 salary tiers to 5 and basing the deductibles on total family income. That information will only be required if the state worker’s spouse is covered by PEIA. A single employee or a married state worker whose spouse gets insurance elsewhere will not have to report total family income.
Cheatham said the state workers most impacted by the tier change will be those state workers who also choose to have their spouses covered because the spouses income will have to be added to determine the salary tier.
Cheatham told lawmakers last week PEIA was working on draft legislation for the tax department bypass.