Cheyenne Mayor Announces No Increase In City Insurance Rates
Cheyenne Mayor Marian Orr announced Thursday that Blue Cross/Blue Sheild will not increase health insurance premium rates for city employees in the next fiscal year.
She says that will reduce what had been a projected $790,000 rate increase down to zero.
Orr said industry standard increases were projected between 9 - 11 percent and instead of accepting these increases, she hired a consultant with industry experience to negotiate.
"We had to aggressively negotiate which is what we did,” Orr said. “We contracted with the best we could find and as a result, the expected $790,000 rate increase dropped down to zero. That is a smart and effective way of managing our city dollars.”
“There were some critics out there who didn’t want to fund an expert in this field to negotiate,” Orr said. But let’s look at the bottom line. We spent $65,000 to fund Novo Benefits and they saved us $790,000. You’d be hard pressed to find any organization our size that will have a zero-dollar rate increase in their health insurance next year. But we did.”
She says the long-term goal is for the city to become self-insured.
“Our discussion with them has included conversation that our goal is become self-insured. In order to do this, we will need significant seed money, and this savings will get us well there. We will be proposing to council that the budgeted $790,000 be placed in a reserve account to fund next year’s plan.”
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