Mary Hansen
The State Journal-Register
After the Springfield City Council Tuesday night voted down a contract for a health clinic to serve city employees, the city’s budget director said it might mean not implementing the cost-saving changes to employee/retiree health plans that the council did approve. At least three of the six aldermen who opposed the $4 million clinic contract with HSHS Medical Group said they weren’t aware that the changes they approved earlier in Tuesday’s meeting were part of a package deal with city unions.
“The lack of a clinic jeopardizes everything that was voted on … because that was a big piece of all the negotiated changes,” budget director Bill McCarty said Wednesday.
Mike Alwood, a union member of the committee that put together the proposal, said the clinic was key to getting the unions to agree to some higher costs for employees, including larger out-of-pocket costs and deductibles.
Aldermen voted on two measures the 12-member Joint Management/Labor Committee agreed to: the clinic contract and the changes to union employees’ health insurance options. A third measure mirrored those changes for the non-union and retiree plans and eliminated a prescription-only option. The committee doesn’t negotiate those plans because the bargaining units don’t cover retirees or non-union employees.
McCarty said the city usually keeps the plan options the same for union employees as non-union or retirees to cut down on administrative costs. So, he considers all three a package deal.
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After a Springfield Clinic executive told aldermen at Tuesday’s meeting that its proposal cost roughly half as much as HSHS Medical Group’s, Redpath and others asked what the city was looking for in the bids and how they were compared.
The availability of some prescription drugs onsite at the clinic, as well as the potential for flexible office hours, were two factors, human resources director Jim Kuizin told the council.
McCarty acknowledged that he and city staff could have done a better job of communicating with aldermen and briefing them on the proposed changes.
Because the labor committee agreed to most of the changes, Ward 7 Ald. Joe McMenamin said the council should have approved the clinic contract.
“The administration is taking a positive step to control and contain health care costs, and the city council should be supporting the administration instead of hindering and rejecting the proposal,” McMenamin said.
Among the options left for the city are restarting the request-for-proposal process or asking the council to reconsider and vote again on the contract, McCarty said. But because the RFP process can be lengthy, seeking proposals a second time could delay changing anything in the health care plan for another year, he added. The city’s fiscal year begins March 1.
Joe McMenamin for Ward 7 