Employees must help fund health care

Steve Levy is Suffolk County executive. 

In June, New Jersey passed legislation that increased health care contributions paid by state employees, while New York's largest employee union agreed to add to what its members already pay in premiums.

These employees were already paying a percentage of their health care costs. New Jersey workers will now pay up to 35 percent of the premium cost, based on their salaries and coverage. In New York, employees will pay an additional 2 percent to 6 percent on top of the 10 percent to 25 percent they currently pay of their premium.

Yet in Suffolk County, employees have never been required to pay a dime for health insurance.

This must be unfathomable to private-sector employees. And in this day and age, it is unsustainable for Suffolk taxpayers to continue to bear 100 percent of the cost for county-employee health care.

Our county coffers are stretched thin by a loss of state aid and several years of sluggish sales-tax and property-tax collections. State cuts this year are leading to 22 percent reductions in the health centers where we care for the county's neediest residents. And even in our cost-efficient self-insured plan, the annual cost of health care rises by anywhere from 5 percent to 10 percent.

With no real mandate relief in sight from Albany, draconian cuts to the small, discretionary portion of our budget are the only option -- unless we can produce real, recurring savings. Recognizing that employee costs are the largest component of our discretionary budget, this translates into layoffs and service cuts.

That's why it's time to require a modest county employee contribution to heath care.

If Suffolk mirrored the recent New York State agreement on health care premiums for current and new employees only -- not retirees or dependent survivors -- we could produce more than $35 million in savings for our budget in 2012, with substantial savings thereafter. The cost of employee health care is currently $309 million -- 11 percent of the county budget. An employee buy-in would allow us to save more than 10 percent in this costly category.

This $35 million is desperately needed to help keep our parks open, our streets safe, our roads paved and our workforce intact.

Health benefits in Suffolk are negotiated with all of our 11 bargaining units together, to develop one health care package for all, separate from any wage agreements. Our benefits package expires at the end of this year, and I have asked for the consortium of unions to sit with my administration and recognize this new reality: Health care without an employee contribution is a thing of the past.

Make no mistake, I believe our county employees are the bedrock of the services we provide. They are dedicated and compassionate. It would be unwelcome news for everyone -- employees, taxpayers and the residents we serve -- were the county left with no choice in this era of dwindling revenues but to lay off several hundred workers.

Continuing the status quo of a zero-contribution benefit plan is simply not affordable. Residents in the private sector who have lost their jobs, who have seen their pensions evaporate or had their benefits reduced, are looking to their elected representatives to inject today's fiscal realities into the public sector, so that taxes are not raised any further.

As the winds of change have swept through statehouses across the nation this year, we've seen administrations take a long, hard look at public employee packages from top to bottom. We are at that crossroads here in Suffolk County. We cannot continue with an unsustainable system of fully taxpayer-financed employee health care, and risk budget chaos and layoffs. Common sense dictates that we go down the path that many municipalities and virtually all of the private sector have, and require an employee buy-in to health care premiums. This would produce real budget savings for our taxpayers.