This is true for Vermonters who get their insurance through the exchange, but it’s not true for school employees who have access to benefits through an entirely different marketplace that’s not available to the rest of us. Perhaps you’ve seen the video where the Vermont NEA says that health care costs have risen 65.6% since 2013 and that Vermonters spend on average 16.7 cents of every dollar on health care. What you probably heard, because it’s the story Vermont NEA wants you to hear, is that teachers and support staff at our schools are the victims of exorbitant health care costs that continue to escalate. But that’s likely not the story you have heard. You read that right, not just in Vermont but in the entire United States.
Vermont school employees already enjoy some of the richest health care benefits in the nation. The totally unsurprising result: a Vermont NEA demand for substantial reductions in both their premium and out-of-pocket share of the overall costs to the tune of tens of millions of dollars of additional taxpayer cost.įortunately, the employer commissioners have said “no way” to this new set of exorbitant demands, and as a result an impasse has been declared by the union negotiators. Unfortunately, all of this seems to have been quickly forgotten by the current Legislature, despite several reminders from both the governor’s administration and the Legislature’s own Joint Fiscal Office. It also set a benchmark of all covered employees paying 20% of such cost and penalized school districts that didn’t achieve this result by “clawing back” the difference between 20% and what they were actually achieving. Back in 2018, the governor recommended and the Legislature passed the law creating statewide bargaining for educational employees to control the spiraling cost of health care benefits.