OSEA may file suit against all 95 Oregon school districts over employee health coverage
The Oregon School Employees Association (OSEA) has served notice that it may file suit against all 95 of the state’s school districts over their employee health coverage that has been provided by a trust run by the Oregon School Boards Association (OSBA). The dispute is over $50 million in reserves held by OSBA, which it plans to keep as districts switch to a state-run health insurance pool. OSEA contends the money must legally be returned to school employees or used to cut their health care costs. But OSBA officials have said the money is being kept to help districts with the long-term costs of health insurance and with governmental policy. OSEA was one of the key groups advocating for a statewide health insurance pool for school employees. OSBA fought against the proposal, in part because the group has had its own health insurance pool, which provided a healthy percentage of the OSBA's operating budget.
When legislators eventually approved the state-run pool, the school board group bowed to the inevitable and announced that it was shutting down its own operation. OSBA announced this spring that the reserves from the association's pool would be saved for the future instead of being used to buy down the final year or two of rates for its members. And school districts were asked to absorb a higher-than-expected 18% increase in health care coverage costs, much higher than the percentage increases of recent years. But the announcement that legal action could be looming raises the dispute up a notch, especially since individual school districts—the school board group's members, in other words—are targeted. "(This) will hopefully get the attention of school board members throughout the state and move them to ... do what is right, not what is self-serving," says Merlene Martin, OSEA’s president. Kevin McCann, executive director of the OSBA, says his board members will meet next week to consider the issue, but that the education communities' larger focus should be on how to make the new statewide pool work to contain spiraling health care costs.
Oregonian By Julia Silverman (Associated Press)
[Editor’s Note: For background, see below.]
NSBA School Law pages on health benefits controversy