County shops for new health insurance help

Butler commissioners might switch from longtime broker.

The Butler County commissioners are shopping for a new health insurance broker partially because of an issue last year that forced them to change from the expensive coverage that caused heartburn for years.

The commissioners approved issuing a request for proposals this week that might result in a switch from longtime broker Horan to another consultant. When they tried to make a switch last year from self-insurance to a lower risk, traditional policy, they had to rescind the contract because a lawsuit was threatened.

The commissioners approved a fully insured plan through the County Employee Benefits Consortium of Ohio (CEBCO) with Anthem in October and then two weeks later rescinded that contract and approved staying with United Healthcare for another year at a cost of $21.2 million. United Healthcare threatened to sue because Horan didn’t put out a request for proposals, so the process was flawed.

Commissioner Don Dixon told the Journal-News that Horan wasn’t the only one to blame.

“I’m not saying it was all Horan’s fault, because it wasn’t,” Dixon said. “Partly it was their fault, I’ll give them 50% of the credit. But we had people or didn’t have people where they should have been, or we thought they knew what they were doing and didn’t know what they were doing, some of the timing was wrong, so it’s just been very cumbersome.”

Dixon declined to name who on the county’s side has contributed to the long-standing health insurance issues, which is one of the county’s biggest expenses. He said as they consider switching away from self-insurance “let’s just take a new look, let’s put a

Insurance