I attended the August 22, 2024, Camden County Commission meeting at 10:00 a.m.
Commissioners Gohagan and Skelton were present. Commissioner Williams had a flat tire.
The first agenda item was BOA Board Reapt. – Brian Schuster.
Brian Schuster was re-appointed to the Board of Adjustment.
The second agenda item was LANEG Annual Equity Sharing Agreement.
Presiding Commissioner Ike Skelton kicked off this agenda item by announcing that he was not a fan of civil asset forfeiture. In his opinion, federal asset forfeiture “dangles” money in front of local agencies to encourage them to participate. The federal forfeiture system bypasses the Missouri constitution, doesn’t require a guilty verdict, and divides the seized money among the participating agencies.
He had less of an issue with Missouri’s asset forfeiture program which seizes assets if a person is found guilty and forwards the funds to the school system.
Chief Deputy Jimmy Brashear explained that the Sharing Agreement was actually just a report that describes the expenses and what the federal funding has been used to purchase. In other words, how the equitable sharing funds were spent.
Skelton read from the agreement that $55,000 was spent on law enforcement equipment. He commented that he did not see Camden County participating in equitable sharing programs going forward from this meeting.
The Commission voted unanimously to table this item for further review.
The final agenda item was Matt Jones – Discuss Employee Prescription Drug Plan.
President Ron Jones and Vice President Matt Jones were present to represent Mutual Medical Plans. Mutual Medical provides the medical plan for Camden County’s self-funded medical insurance.
Matt Jones informed the Commission that prescription costs have increased $230,000 since Camden County has switched from Express Scripts to Script Care. He also wanted to make the commissioners aware that the county’s employees have a telemedicine program available to them. Jones mentioned that the Commission had been told that switching prescription plans would save them money, but that has not been the case.
Jeremy Billington, Camden County’s medical insurance broker, spoke next and disputed Jones’ claims. He thought that the way Mutual Medical had created their prescription cost report was deceptive and it failed to provide any idea of the increase in total prescriptions funded by the new plan.
I’ve discussed before about how the county’s medical plan works.
To quote from that article:
“To explain a bit, Billington is the insurance broker who manages Camden County’s self-funded group health plan. Rather than contract with a health plan provider, Camden County funds its own health plan for county employees.
This saves Camden County some money until a plan member becomes gravely ill or severely injured. In this case, the Camden County health plan tells the sick (expensive) member that if they to go to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and tell the ACA that they lost their insurance, Camden County will pay all of their out of pocket costs for the ACA insurance. The employee qualifies for special ACA enrollment because they lost their health coverage, but that is not what truly happened. The loss has to be involuntary, usually because you were terminated. How can Camden County possibly justify paying ACA insurance costs for employees who were able to enroll in ACA for involuntary loss of coverage?”
Mutual Medical refers to the Affordable Care Act as the ACP. At this most recent meeting, Billington explained that under the current county medical plan, if an employee retires, they stay on the county medical plan until they reach 65. And if they or their spouse are on the ACP when they retire, the county will keep them on the ACP until they’re 65.
It quickly became apparent that Billington and the Mutual Medical Jones family do not like each other. In fact, it was brought up that there may be litigation ongoing between them.
The employees who were present expressed their preference for the new prescription plan.
There is a lot to unwrap regarding Camden County’s medical plan and insurance.
There have been many irregularities related to costs and expenditures. The County Auditor is currently auditing the plan’s financial history because of a major balance discrepancy. The reserves backing up the plan recently ran out and the county had to increase the premium amount it deposited into the plan for each employee in an effort to sustain the plan financially. It’s also hard to tell how much the obvious animosity between the insurance broker and the medical plan company has impacted the plan’s administration.
The Commission seems like they’re trying to get to the bottom of it all and do what’s best for county employees and their families. They’ll have to do a lot of digging first and we all know that when you start digging into the details around the courthouse, you never know what you might find.
And that was that.
Among the Dogwoods 
Sounds like asking to employee to say they’ve lost their insurance is a bit of a stretch of the truth. Sent from my iPhone
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Especially when you are offering to pay all of their out of pocket expenses
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The interesting thing that came out in this meeting is that the broker is the person who enrolls the employee into the ACP. So the person enrolling them into the Affordable Care Act knows full well that they didn’t “lose” their medical insurance.
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As a retired HR Director having an employee drop off to ACA because of health expense is not appropriate. Good thing this program is being audited. Self funded plans have regulations also.
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