MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A Monongalia County Delegate is expressing his displeasure with the Public Employees Insurance Agency’s Finance Board and the plan they’re rolling out for state workers next fiscal year.
“At the top of the income bracket, it’s going to make things cheaper,” Delegate John Williams (D-Monongalia, 51) said. “But with folks at the bottom of the income bracket with people who make more then them, it’s making there’s more expensive.”
He said one of the prime issues is the choice to reduce the number of income brackets used by the Finance Board. When coupled with rising insurance premiums and prescription drug costs for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2018, he said it’s creating an imbalance.
“We’re really kind of punishing the poor and crediting the rich with this plan, and it’s really unfortunate.”
The new plan, introduced at a Finance Board meeting in Charleston last month, increases premiums by 0.5 percent for current state employees. It also eliminates a flat co-pay for preferred brand prescription drugs and introduces a new co-insurance percentage payment of 30 percent. That, Williams said, sends the wrong message to current, retired, and future state workers.
“They’re concerned for, literally, their lives,” he said. “I mean, literally, how they are going to take care of themselves. It’s not just a good message to me. It’s not good public policy to tell teachers, ‘Yeah, we’re not going to pay you much in salary and we’re not going to provide you much in benefits either.'”
Williams also chided the state legislature for failing to raise taxes — suggesting a tobacco tax as a possibility — and instead continually punting on the future of state workers’ benefits.
“From the body I now work in in the Legislature, it’s been lacking,” Williams said. “They had the chance to increase the tobacco tax to a dollar the summer before I was elected. They didn’t do that, and so it is just this proverbial can that is continually kicked down the road.”
The Finance Board met in Morgantown earlier this week as part of the first in a series of public meetings throughout the state. The plan has met significant resistance from the education sector, as WAJR reported following the meeting Monday.