EDITORIAL: It’s time to investigate Teachers Health Trust

The challenge of retaining and recruiting enough teachers to staff Clark County School District classrooms is about to become even more difficult. And none of the new programs, incentives and policies enacted by the 2015 Legislature can help.

The health plan that covers thousands of teachers and their families, which has been insolvent for years, is on the verge of collapse. As reported by the Review-Journal’s Neal Morton, teachers’ out-of-pocket costs are rising to ensure the Teachers Health Trust has enough cash flow to pay claims. Effective July 23, the trust, created and administered by the teachers’ union, is requiring all plan participants to pay 20 percent of medical expenses on top of co-payments. The coming rise in costs is expected to trigger a rush for routine care that will further strain the trust’s finances.

Workers across the country are facing similar increases in the cost of their health care. But the kind of benefit erosion that local teachers are seeing could be severe enough to break the budgets of families dealing with serious health problems or drive them out of the district in pursuit of better insurance. If the trust goes belly-up, teachers could be on the hook for unpaid claims.

And uncompetitive benefits are bound to scare off candidates for the system’s thousands of teaching vacancies. The valley needs great teachers to lift achievement and graduation rates. Lousy health insurance won’t attract great teachers.

What’s especially concerning about the trust’s insolvency is the union’s lack of transparency. If the teachers’ health plan were administered by the school district, or a private insurer contracted by the school district, elected trustees could get to the bottom of the problems quickly. The trust collects more than $100 million per year from taxpayers and millions more dollars from teachers, yet it has no obligation to open the trust’s books to the public.

Clark County Education Association officials say the trust’s problems are rooted in rising health care costs and an older, predominantly female pool of participants. They previously refused to dissolve the trust and allow another entity to handle teachers’ health insurance because of concerns that benefits would decline. Now no one can credibly argue that a large health insurance company would deliver worse benefits and such instability in exchange for a contract this large. Yet the union still insists on managing this enormous revenue stream, to the detriment of its members.

The failing Teachers Health Trust is not a union issue. It’s a classroom issue. The quality of the region’s teaching workforce will degrade if teachers’ health insurance keeps deteriorating.

The trust’s financial problems have reached a point where it’s reasonable to ask whether incompetence or malfeasance might be contributing factors.

It’s time for law enforcement to get involved. And if local authorities don’t want to look at the trust’s books, then Attorney General Adam Laxalt should.