LYNCHBURG - To counteract the rising costs of health care, Lynchburg College and Sweet Briar College joined forces with 10 other private colleges in Virginia to form a benefits consortium for their employees.
“It’s sort of a win-win for everybody,” said Paul Davies, VP for finance and administration at Sweet Briar College. “By reducing our costs, it takes the pressure off of increasing tuition so our students have a more affordable education.”
The benefits consortium was shaped by eight years of research and planning by the Council of Independent Colleges in Virginia, and is the only partnership of its kind in the state.
New health care plans went into effect Jan. 1 for participating colleges, resulting in better employee benefits at a lower price, officials at Lynchburg College and Sweet Briar said.
“Because we’re a larger group, we’re able to get better pricing and also share some of the risk,” said Steve Bright, VP for business and finance at Lynchburg College.
“Some colleges did see a reduction of costs immediately and some saw rates not go up as quickly as they would have otherwise.”
In the big picture, the partnership could help keep tuition down. It is not uncommon for colleges to face 10 to 20 percent increases in health care costs from one year to the next — a burden schools are often forced to share with employees and students, Bright said.
“Health insurance is something that’s just increasing in exponential ways. We just think that going through this effort is the right thing to do to keep the cost of higher education down,” Bright said.
Had Lynchburg College stayed with its old provider, insurance rates would have risen about 13 percent this year — a burden that might have affected tuition. Under the benefits consortium, employee contributions did not increase for the first time in years, Bright said.
At Sweet Briar, employees now have three plans to choose from, instead of one, and costs did not increase for the first time more than five years, Davies said.
Each college has committed to launch a wellness plan for their employees in the next three years, creating incentives for employees to make healthy lifestyle choices. Lynchburg College is the only consortium member to already have such a plan in place.
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