Dear Members

For many of you, the main reason you are members is for our Major Medical Plan. Since most of you don’t attend Association meetings, your main source of information about the Federation and our Major Medical plan is thru the Turf and Garden. I’m starting on my fourth year on the Trustee Board and just been elected the Trustee Board chairman along with Mas Nagai as co-chairman.

As many of you know, we are a self-funded plan, meaning the money that we all pay in premiums goes first to our office and then  to Anthem Blue Cross who pays for the medical, hospital and under 65 prescription drug claims that our members incur. Of course, there is all the cost with running this program; Anthem Blue Cross administering our plan, our consultant Eddie Kamiya, and Tom Kasai in our office administering the billing.

 Over the past few years, our rates have been much cheaper than similar plans elsewhere, and many of you didn’t understand why we were able to give such good rates.  So when you received your January, February, premium bill back in December, there was much shock when you all saw the big increase. 

Let me explain what happened. A few years back when we started the Medicare Part D drug plan thru Anthem Blue Cross, it was very helpful to us financially since much of the cost for our senior members Major Medical Plan was the prescription drug claims. The first year we switched our senior members away from our plan into the Part D plan we had a very good year overall and received a big refund for our group.

Since many of our Board members are sympathetic to our 65 and over members we decided to give much of the refund back to you all the next year in subsidized premium rates (the members’ premium rate is lower than what is being charged to the Federation by Anthem Blue Cross.)

 The problem with this is that it spoiled you all since we didn’t explain to you what the actual premium rates were. The following year we had a good year with not as big a refund and we did the same thing. But good things sometimes come to an end. And for 2008, our group financially did not do as well as in previous years so we were forced to set the 2009 premium rates close to what we are being charged by Anthem Blue Cross. With declining membership and declining reserve funds, we could not continue with the high subsidy which resulted, for many of you a big increase in your premium rates for 2009.

In the present and coming years we face many challenges. With our group insurance, we need to bring in more members into the plan, plain and simple. Do we market to current people in the landscape field, partner with other groups, bring in more family members? This is where we are stuck at now. There is a fear about who we bring in and the consequences that may occur, especially those from different backgrounds. Also, there is a loss of identity with perhaps moving away from a professional gardening organization. But we must at least try to do something.  If we do nothing to address this, we are a few bad financial years away from not being able to give you all very competitive insurance rates. If this happens, most of you will quit the Federation and go elsewhere for your insurance. Please understand these issues and especially to the younger members we need your help so we can tackle these issues.

Sincerely,

Derek Furukawa, Chairman of the SCGF Major Medical Trustee Board