BISMARCK – Legislation aimed at ensuring that thousands of North Dakota public employees can keep the same health benefits and medical providers when their insurer changes July 1 will be introduced Wednesday, House Majority Leader Al Carlson said.
Lawmakers, who also are affected by the switch, began working on the bill after the board of the North Dakota Public Employees Retirement System voted Feb. 19 to switch the group’s health coverage to Sanford Health Plan.
The change will affect about 29,000 public employees, retirees and their families – an estimated 65,000 insured lives in all – and end 37 years of coverage by Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota, which was underbid by Sanford Health Plan.
“This legislation is just guaranteeing that what we had yesterday is what we’ll have tomorrow,” Carlson said Tuesday.
The Delayed Bills Committee will meet Wednesday morning to approve the bill for introduction, a process that’s necessary because the regular deadline for introducing bills has already passed. The bill will be referred to the House Industry, Business and Labor Committee, chaired by Rep. George Keiser, R-Bismarck.
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“It’s one of those things we’ll not let sit. We’ll try to move it right through,” Carlson said.
Keiser said the bill has two main goals: to create a “reasonable firewall” to make sure information collected by Sanford Health Plan is kept separate from Sanford Health and maintained as propriety data not to be shared or used for marketing, and to require that benefits and access to providers is “closely approximate” to what NDPERS members currently have under Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota.
“We have tried to be reasonable in our approach,” he said.
Cindy Morrison, executive vice president for Sanford Health, said Sanford Health Plan is committed to matching the existing provider network for NDPERS.
More than 90 percent of North Dakota providers participating in NDPERS were already a part of the Sanford Health Plan network, and Sanford has an open offer to all providers to join the network, Morrison said. Sanford officials are meeting with Essentia Health this week and have also been in contact with Trinity Health, she said.
“We are optimistic this will be a smooth transition,” she said in an emailed statement.
Carlson said lawmakers realize Sanford Health Plan’s provider network won’t match the Blues’ network doctor-for-doctor.
“There’s going to be some leeway,” he said.
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Sparb Collins, executive director of NDPERS, said the board also understands the networks aren’t identical, but a disruption analysis “found that there was a substantial matching of it.”
Morrison said Sanford officials received an initial draft of the bill a few weeks ago and were waiting to see the new draft before providing commentary in the event the bill has changed significantly.
The six-year contract must be renewed every two years and has an estimated value of $610 million to $640 million over the two years.
