Overweight workers may pay higher insurance costs

Raleigh News & Observer

North Carolina — a state where tobacco and barbecue have long reigned — may soon hit state employees who smoke or are seriously overweight with higher health-insurance costs.

Legislative leaders introduced a bill Thursday that seeks to keep the State Health Plan solvent by reducing some benefits and raising premiums less than 8 percent each year over the next two years. Smokers or obese people would be forced into the coverage option that carries the highest deductibles and co-payments.

Jack Walker, the plan’s executive administrator, said those employees are the most costly and therefore should shoulder more of the burden. The average additional cost to the plan for each smoker is $2,000 a year, he said, and it takes a $2,360 hit for each employee who weighs 35 percent or more over what is considered fit.

Those costs are a major problem for the plan, which covers roughly 660,000 state employees and their dependents. The plan is free for employees; insuring a family costs $489 a month.

The plan is relatively expensive, and therefore unattractive, for healthy families, but a bargain for the ill. That, and the relatively old state work force, means that the chronically or catastrophically ill compose half the membership; the plan spends nearly 90 percent of its money serving them. Trends show that population exceeding half the membership in future years.

Smokers would have to quit or join a cessation program by July 1, 2010, to stay on a less expensive plan. The seriously overweight would need to get in better shape by July 1, 2012, to stay on a less expensive plan.