Health Insurance - Rochester Area School Health Plan (RASHP)

Health insurance is a difficult issue for our nation.  Depending on your perspective you may be a person trying to secure and pay for health insurance, a patient in immediate need of insurance coverage, an employer feeling the pinch of the cost of insurance, a doctor trying to negotiate overwhelming paperwork, or the US Supreme Court trying to make sense of conflicting arguments for how insurance should be obtained and provided. You may have one or even several opinions about how health care issues should be dealt with. 

But even though the major questions regarding health insurance availability, cost, and coverage are national in scope, local organizations don’t have to be passive about dealing with them.

Most school districts in Monroe County participate in a variety of cooperative self-insurance plans that enable employers to reduce insurance costs without reducing coverage.  By coming together in a group, districts can better control the risks associated with a self-insurance plan. 

Particularly notable among the local self-insurance programs is the Rochester Area School Health Plan (RASHP).  Although it took several years for RASHP to become the main source of health insurance for school employees, the effort to establish and build this cooperative has been very worthwhile.  Since 2009, RASHP has saved the school districts over $361 million (yes, million) compared to what they would have had to pay had they remained on the community rated plan.  By enabling districts to help contain the rising cost of health insurance, this cooperative has had a direct and positive effect on district budgets.

Information on the several local school district self-insurance plans can be found on page 30 of The Best for Less at http://www.mcsba.org/exemplary/2011BestForLess-Web.pdf.