Will health plan switch in Nassau bring budget pains or gains?

Daily Point

Nassau workers face new health-plan shift

Growing fiscal tensions around the state regarding public-employee health insurance have arrived in Nassau County — with unknown long-term impacts for both governments and their workers.

The state’s Excelsior health insurance plan is due to be discontinued as of Jan. 1. The plan has been provided by the New York State Health Insurance Program, or NYSHIP, which will still offer its Empire Plan as a fallback.

For about 4,200 civilian Nassau employees who belong to Civil Service Employees Association Local 830, that will mean withdrawal from Excelsior, which the union agreed to join as a cost concession in its last contract negotiation.

It is unclear how Excelsior’s demise might affect the county’s budget projections. Will the result be higher costs for the county? For employees? For both? For neither? Health insurance pressures are especially relevant at a time when county payroll costs have swelled, mostly attributed to an increase in the number of police, who get a different health plan.

Matthew Cantone, acting director of communications for the CSEA statewide, told The Point Monday: "As far as Nassau, we have a contract that guarantees our membership fully paid benefits through 2030 at the level we currently have or better."

According to a memo that the state’s Department of Civil Service sent out in February, agencies affected were urged to notify the state Civil Service Department about how they planned to replace Excelsior coverage.

The department memo said that Excelsior enrollees would be automatically signed up in NYSHIP’s Empire Plan unless the public employers told them otherwise by July 1.

Contacted Monday, Department of Civil Service spokesperson Erin McCarthy said in a statement: "We are committed to ensuring all employees have uninterrupted access to high-quality health insurance during this transition period. A majority of Excelsior Plan employers have chosen to join the Empire Plan and the vast network it provides to enrollees."

Sources in Albany told The Point, however, that Nassau County has yet to respond to the DCS request despite follow-up communications in April, June and July. Nassau has been given an extension to Oct. 1 to report whether county officials wish to sign with a plan other than Empire.

The county’s CSEA-organized workforce was covered by Empire before the Excelsior agreement. Some of the workers found Excelsior, the replacement, to be less comprehensive. For public employers — pressured by ever-spiking health insurance costs for their staffs — the attraction was clear: Local governments would pay in less to cover employees than they had with Empire.

In the 13-year CSEA contract signed last year, the county was said to be saving $280 million in health costs by using the Excelsior plan. Members would have higher copays and the county would have lower premiums. What now?

Elsewhere, from upstate Cortland County to New York City, proposed health insurance changes for retirees — intended to reduce the public’s costs — have blossomed as a political flashpoint. But in Nassau, the Nassau Retirees Legal Fund managed to block the Empire-to-Excelsior switch for themselves, arguing that the CSEA does not represent retirees although some in county government had appeared to think so. Officially, that case is still pending. The fund still seeks to establish in court that retirees cannot have their plans reduced.

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

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Noise central

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Reference Point

The dead who gave us a living Constitution

One charge that has been leveled in the 2024 presidential campaign deals with the alleged threat to democracy posed by former President Donald Trump, a charge opponents say is fueled by his fondness for autocrats, disdain for checks and balances, embrace of strongman language, and call to terminate parts of the Constitution.

Eighty years ago, Newsday’s editorial board was wrestling with much the same issues.

The board’s source of worry then was President Franklin Roosevelt, for whom the board had little love, a point made clear in an editorial called "It May Be Clumsy, But ---" that ran on Aug. 1, 1944.

"The Constitution is galling to a man of grandiose plans," the board wrote. "He sees his cherished schemes hamstrung by the words of dead men written over 150 years ago. He argues that these men knew nothing of conditions as they exist today; that the dead should bury their dead and let the living carry on."

While the board conceded that this failure to visualize the future was true for things like airplanes, telephones and cars, it argued that "the one thing they could and did foresee was the lust for power that lies dormant in all men." It was for that reason, the board wrote, that the founders created the system of checks and balances "whereby no one branch of our government could become all powerful."

The board began its anti-FDR argument by praising New York Gov. Thomas Dewey for resisting extreme pressure in refusing to call a special session of the State Legislature to overturn in some way the election of Thomas Aurelio for a state Supreme Court judgeship. Aurelio had been endorsed by both Democrats and Republicans before it was discovered he was "the buddy of the notorious Frank Costello of Sands Point," the boss of the Luciano crime family. Dewey, the board wrote, "felt that the election of Aurelio, deplorable as it was, did not warrant a hurry up change in the constitution . . . Dewey argues that temporary expediency is not the better part of wisdom."

Roosevelt, the board argued, "is a candidate of a different color. He has always believed that the end justified the means."

The board cited Roosevelt’s unsuccessful attempts to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with his own justices after the Court voted to halt some aspects of FDR’s New Deal program — an issue back in the news after President Joe Biden’s proposal to add justices to the court. The board also noted Roosevelt’s effort to purge some Southern Democrat senators who similarly had not backed those New Deal policies, and a ploy to make it easier for service members overseas to vote since they were widely expected to support Roosevelt.

"Democracy under our constitution may be clumsy and creaky and slow moving," the board wrote. "But as long as we hang on to it we will not lose our liberties."

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com, Amanda Fiscina-Wells amanda.fiscina-wells@newsday.com

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