As the Kanawha County Commission is looking in its budget to find ways to make up for its $600,000 deficit, the commissioners keep turning to one source - the county employee health insurance.
The latest attempt, which was approved at the county commission meeting this Thursday, is to raise the deductible for employees visiting the emergency room from $50 to $100.
In 2014, Kanawha County employees made 270 trips to the emergency room, 8.7 percent of those visits were considered minor or low-to-moderate.
According to Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper, that's what the rise in deductible is about. He wants employees who are going to the emergency room for colds to find a primary care physician instead.
"It's not about the money," Carper said. "People are better off having a general practitioner. Less errors are made if you have a doctor who knows you."
Last year, the county spent $949,941 on emergency room visits for its employees. It spent $84,355 on visits to urgent care, an average of $155 per visit.
The county is below the averages of 3.3 percent of emergency room visits for minor injuries and 10.6 percent for low to moderate injuries, according to Highmark West Virginia.
While sending people to the correct care provider when they get hurt may be a way for the county to save money, it really doesn't make too much of a difference. Assuming the 8.7 percent of minor and low to moderate cases went to urgent care, it would only decrease the county's emergency room bill by $45,731.
If you took the about 21 cases that 8.7 percent entails (out of 241 because there's an extremely high chance that people weren't admitted to the emergency room for minor or low to moderate injuries) and multiplied the cases by the average cost of an urgent care visit, it would cost around $3,250.
Therefore the county would be saving about $42,481.
While that's only 7 percent of the $600,000 deficit that the county is facing, it's still more than the about $30,000 the county saved by increasing insurance costs for its employees by 20 percent and it doesn't include how much they'll save with a higher deductible.
In other business, the county commission set in motion a plan to switch the software Kanawha County Emergency Operations Center to WebEOC, a program that currently is used in Newport News, Virginia.
The new software will provide greater online connectivity for emergency responders by being able to track emergency vehicles and issue notifications when tasks need to be done.
The commission also voted to provide money to Capital High School's athletics program so they can remodel an abandoned building into an indoor training facility for their baseball, softball, soccer and lacrosse teams.
The board of trustees for the baseball team asked for $31,000, which the commission will pay in two payments, draining their table games fund.
The commission also will waive the building permit fee so that Greater St. Albans wastewater system can be expanded along the Coal River in Tornado. The fee would have been $40,250.
Reach Daniel Desrochers
at dan.desrochers@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-4886 or
@drdesrochers on Twitter.