2023-08-04 Salary Commission Minutes

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Salary Commission ACTING CHR FARAHL I only saw the ones from two days ago today. MS. FRENZ: Then your email will be full of responses. ACTING CHR FARAHL Okay. MS. FRENZ: Commissioner Namahoe. August 4, 2023 MS. NAMAHOE: No, I was just going to agree that I was reading them all the way up through this morning. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Commissioner. ACTING CHR FARAHL The communication I saw the 7 questions. And 6 of those questions, the Human Resources Department should have—and that would make life easier for everybody because that information they should readily have. MS. NAMAHOE: This is Commissioner Namahoe. I'm going to share the following under "New Business"—and this has to do with to help set the tone for the great amount of information that we've received all the way through this morning, which would be via the emails starting that are coming in from the department heads or the deciding officers. I guess that's the best way to call them, right? For employers their largest cost is wages. Thereafter, the largest cost that an employer bears on behalf of their human resources is health premiums—healthcare premiums. In the work that I did prior to retiring from HMSA, which I just retired on June 30', I worked in the department that sees the underwriting side of the macro information side. I could never pull up peoples—members individual information on the subscriber level but I can tell you about Hawaii County because I worked with the (inaudible) and large businesses. One of my—one of the complements to my department was the EUTF book. So, I can share that in the last couple of years, due to COVID, my recollection of where HMSA suppressed premium increases, absorbed medical trend costs—"medical trend" is the term we used for medical inflation. We absorbed those over the lastconsecutively, since the beginning of COVID 2020. Going forward in 2024 we're going to start—well, and for the smaller businesses they saw it effective July 2023. The increases are coming because HMSA—and the other insurance companies did the same—absorbed the great amount of pandemic costs. And when I say what those costs are, when you're talking about someone that is sitting in the ICU on a bed, you're probably talking about $200,000.00 a week. So, when we stop and think about how many hospitals we have across Hawaii, and it's about 20 to 29—depend on what you quantify as a hospitalKohala, the Hamakua facility that sort of thing. You start to get into the differentials of what a hospital is. But a lot of those costs are now going to go back on the employers Page 4