City council saves money with new insurance policy

GONZALES — Gonzales City Council, Tuesday night, approved a resolution approving the city's 2018 insurance provider for health, dental, vision and life insurance.

Frost Insurance, an independent insurance agency, annually reviews the city's current insurance coverages, looking at the city's providers and compares them to multiple other providers, offering similar coverage.

The city's providers have in the past been, Texas Municipal League (TML), Principal and Colonial. In previous years, TML has always had the cheapest monthly premiums for health insurance. This contributes to why the City of Gonzales has been with TML for more than 20 years. The City of Gonzales received TML's new 2018 rates and found an estimated 10 percent increase in the premium for employee-only coverage.

Currently the city pays 100 percent of the health insurance for each full-time employee, but pays no part of dependent coverage. The City of Gonzales currently pays TML $470.08 per month, per full-time employee. With the new rates that the City received from TML, the monthly rate starting January 2018 will increase to $517.10 which comes out to $47.02 more a month per employee.

Principal is the city's dental, vision, life and accidental death and dismemberment insurance provider. The city has been with Principal since January 2015.

The city has decided to go with Humana. With Humana, the city would no longer have to pay Frost Insurance $28,000 annually to secure the best coverages, because Frost was able to work their commission into Humana’s proposal. Frost Insurance projects Humana will save the city $129,593.42 in 2018.

Mayor Connie Kacir said moving to Humana will also extend savings to the city's employees in the amount of $45,036.