PEIA task force panel must find $50M per year of cost savings/new revenue

Of the three PEIA Task Force subcommittees, the cost and revenue subcommittee might have the most daunting task: coming up with ways to cut costs or raise revenue by about $50 million a year to maintain the plan’s health insurance coverage benefits at current levels.

Subcommittee Chairman Joe Letnaunchyn, president of the West Virginia Hospital Association, said one of the panel’s missions is to find cost savings in the Public Employees Insurance Agency without cutting benefits. It must do this while dealing with medical and pharmaceutical costs that are growing at a rate of 5 percent to 6 percent each year.

“It’s another $40 [million] to $50 million every year, give or take,” he said.

As Douglas Kirk, the Division of Highways’s representative on the subcommittee put it, “If you draw that line out very far, it gets to where PEIA is our entire state budget.”

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