Health Care Town Hall

At the tail end of a relatively successful fight to restore funding to our institutions, Governor Murphy and the NJ state legislature elected to include a savings of $200M over two years that would be achieved by increasing your health insurance costs. This was not in response to an emergency, but a deliberate choice by the politicians that are supposed to be representing us. Even after more than double that amount was found in unexpected revenue, these cuts remained.

As a result, our health insurance plan options will now have increased deductibles, or deductibles where none existed, increased out of pocket maximums, and large increases to prescription drug costs, among others. NJ DIRECT 15 – the plan that most of us still have – will be hit particularly hard, including a projected 20% increase in costs. Worse yet, we are hearing that the state will not even have information about plan costs until after the open enrollment period, and have not yet even committed to another open enrollment period when this information is available.

The only winners here are the insurance companies. Costs for care continue to climb, and no one in state government seems committed to making a sustainable fix, even though we’ve tried to get legislation passed to do just that. Your legislators need to hear from you! Tell your legislators and the governor how these changes will affect your family and that it is wrong to cut our heard-earned benefits. Also tell the gubernatorial candidates here and here (and make sure you’re registered to vote by October 14!).

The fight on this issue is not over, but in the meantime join our town hall series, hosted by the Coalition of Rutgers Unions and workers at Rutgers, University Hospital, and NJIT to learn what we know about what is changing, and to talk with your union colleagues at Rutgers, University Hospital, and NJIT about our plan options.

We will be holding additional town halls throughout the month and will send information as it becomes available, as well as information about joining the fight to save our benefits.

In Solidarity,

Ryan Novosielski
Casandra Gabriele
Sabrina Brown Oliver