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CHARLESTON -- A subcommittee tasked with submitting a final report to the PEIA Taskforce by Wednesday will wait six days until there is more agreement on what kind of report to submit.
The PEIA Taskforce Public Outreach Subcommittee met Tuesday at the Capitol in Charleston. The subcommittee is tasked with taking comments and suggestions gathered from 21 public meetings and surveys and presenting the information to the full taskforce.
But there was debate among members of the subcommittee about the kind of report to send. Representatives of the West Virginia Education Association, the state chapter of the American Federation of Teachers and the state School Service Personnel Association want to take the public comments and distill them down to official recommendations.
Many of the recommendations made at meetings for fixing and funding the state's public employee health insurance program include raising coal and natural gas severance tax rates or increasing sin taxes on soda, tobacco and alcohol.
On the other side of the table, Senate President Mitch Carmichael, R-Jackson, said it was important to relay to the taskforce what people are saying, but didn't believe the report should take the form of recommendations.
Carmichael pointed out the number of people who attended the public meetings, spoke at public meetings and participated in surveys was a small sample size. According to the draft report, 1,528 people participated in the public hearings, or less than 1 percent of the 233,000 PEIA members enrolled in the program. One quarter of 1 percent of PEIA enrollees spoke at the meetings. And less than one half of 1 percent completed the surveys.
"We're making decisions and proposing plans based on a very small sample size," Carmichael said. "If you polled the state Senate, that would be one senator. You'd be making your decisions based on that."
"I don't think that's a fair analysis comparing it to the Senate," said WVEA President Dale Lee. "It wasn't the public's job to come out. When you look at the 233,000 total participants, there's a large number that are kids and things like that. So, that's not an accurate reflection."
Carmichael said most of the answers to the survey's questions were:
• PEIA is too expensive.
• The program needs a dedicated revenue source.
• An increase in the natural gas severance tax rate was the best way to fund PEIA.
• Half of respondents didn't like PEIA's healthy lifestyles program.
"Our recommendation to fix PEIA is based on that sample size," Carmichael said. "That's what we heard and those are the people who provided the input."
"Regardless of the sample size, if everyone said something different, then we would have something to figure out," said Christine Campbell, president of AFT-WV. "But everyone said basically the same thing."
The subcommittee agreed to meet again Aug. 7 to finalize the report before submitting it to the full taskforce, but that means going beyond its deadline to submit the report, which was the end of July. The Cost & Revenue Subcommittee meets Aug. 23 and will have two weeks to review the report.
"Aug. 7 is a dead certain date," Lee said. "I don't care if we have to stay here 14 hours on Aug. 7, I'm not going to allow us to go past Aug. 7."
The PEIA Taskforce was formed in March by Gov. Jim Justice after the nine-day work stoppage by teachers and school service personnel. Justice has since frozen premium and coverage levels. In June, wage tiers were raised to keep the 5 percent pay increases for public employees from causing PEIA premiums to increase.
(Adams can be contacted at sadams@newsandsentinel.com)