Albany County is moving to create an intermunicipal healthcare consortium to ease costs and mitigate confusion about coverage.
County Executive Dan McCoy and the county legislature have approved an intermunicipal agreement that will form the Albany County Healthcare Consortium.
McCoy says the idea of launching such an entity, aimed at providing cost savings for towns, villages, and cities within the county, had been in the works for some time when it was interrupted by the pandemic.
“We're putting it together," said McCoy. "We can have a savings for the towns and villages within Albany County. We've had people say to us, ‘well, what’s the county benefit?’, We don't. We're self-insured. We already benefit. This will be a savings to, say, a certain town or village or city, for them to come under our umbrella has the potential of saving them, depending on the size of that city or town, potentially millions of dollars. So it was going off the ground, pre-COVID. We had people sign on initially, and then obviously the world changed. COVID hit, and we pivoted, and now we're getting back to this.”
McCoy says nine municipalities have signed onto the program including the city of Watervliet, where fellow Democratic Mayor Charles Patricelli characterizes the program as a "must."
“We've been facing 15, 20, even sometimes 25% increases in our health insurance," said Patricelli. "And this year alone, it's almost 13 to 15% of an increase. Almost 3 to 4% of our budget increase will be resultant of the health insurance. So because we have under 100 employees, we fall into a category that makes it very expensive for us. The consortium was putting it together with the other areas will make no reduce our rates considerably, or that's what the intent is. So this is something that we've been trying to do for a long time, and hopefully it comes into fruition soon, because, no, we just can't keep absorbing all these, these rates.”
Patricelli says the program will help avoid further budgetary strain and maintain staffing levels.
McCoy extends an invitation to other local governments and communities to join the consortium, which he says will be overseen by an individual yet-to-be selected.
“We’re going to either bring someone in the first year, because the partnership with the legislature, they did pass this. Once it gets through, our budget, [to be] finalized in December, that will be a budgeted position, and, you know, we’ll either hire somebody or someone internally. They will be the face of this. So again, to sit down with, you know, I don't just want to say a little village that might not have the personnel to understand this, and they go through a third party, and that's a lot of the problems, too. You're relying on third parties or second parties to really do the best that they can for your health care, and sometimes it doesn't work out that way. So we're going to be that person for them, and that's how committed we are to this,” said McCoy.
New Scotland Town Supervisor Doug LaGrange says the idea is a "no-brainer."
“We've always said, from our town's perspective, that we'd be happy to join into anything that would give us the same or better coverage for less money. And that's the principle behind forming the consortium with many municipalities under the auspices of Albany County. So we continue to be interested, and we continue to say ‘yes’, that we're interested. It’s just that all the components of it have to come together so that we know it's what we want, and what we'd like to be, you know, a full partner in,” LaGrange said.
The other municipalities that will make up the consortium are the Town of Guilderland, Villages of Altamont, Menands and Green Island, Capital Region BOCES and two school districts: North Colonie and Berne-Knox-Westerlo. A start date for the partnership has not been announced.
