Bargaining in Summer 2011

In addition to the health care cost increases that GTFs will almost certainly face over the next two years, the UO would also like us to go back to the table in the summer of 2011 to bargain over more cost increases.

Right now, our health care plan covers, well, everything that our health care plan covers. We call this the "base plan." Each year, the GTFF Trust has PacificSource price out the costs of various benefit improvements. Even though we go through this process, we rarely ask for them at the table, as they cost "additional" money and the University has been very reluctant to pay for "additional" items.

One thing we did fight for recently was an increase to our low annual cap on total benefit costs. You may remember that we tried to raise our annual cap from $150,000 to $1 million - so that the GTFF plan was good enough to allow people to apply for a federal subsidy for children - but no dice, we were only able to raise the cap to $250,000.

Well, this year, as you know, Congress passed the health care reform and some of the provisions of the law will impact our health insurance plan. The most obvious one being an elimination of annual caps on benefits. There may be others. Interpretation of the law is still being done and it is safe to say that no one really knows what is going to happen and, more importantly, how much it will cost.

The UO wants us to sit down in the summer of 2011, when we'd ideally know how much the changes to our plan that have mandated by Congress are going to cost, and bargain over which party pays what. The UO thinks this would only be fair, given that we traditionally only bargain over the cost of the "base plan" and additional changes are usually seen as costs over-and-above the base plan.

We, however, feel strongly that the GTFF is already agreeing to pay additional cost for health insurance next year and we cannot enter into an agreement that guarantees that we will have some unknown, but fixed, amount in increased costs AND some unknown and unfixed amount of increased costs.

We feel that any changes to the plan mandated by Congress be considered part of the "base plan" as neither party is necessarily asking that they be included in the plan.

We feel strongly that a two-year deal should be a two-year deal and GTFs have some security. The UO's proposal would be unsecure and almost require that GTFs have some unknown cost increases to health care coming their way in the 2011-12 academic year.