Insurance alert

The Business Council of Westchester this spring will use a private foundation grant to launch a program aimed at extending health insurance coverage to sole proprietors and nonprofit agencies in Westchester County.

The New York State Health Foundation in New York City awarded a $150,000 grant to the Business Council, in tandem with the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce, to raise awareness among insurance brokers of Healthy New York, a state-subsidized insurance program, and raise enrollment in the lower-premium program among small-business owners in Westchester and Otsego counties.

Norman Michaels Jr., a Business Council director and president of Michaels & Associates Inc., an employee benefits and financial services company in Armonk, said the council will work with the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce to develop a similar program in Otsego County. The grant program here is led by Michaels and Paul J. Vitale, Business Council vice president for government and community relations.

Healthy NY is a program of the state Insurance Department that last year provided comprehensive health benefits to nearly 150,000 New York residents through 17 private health plans. Since the start of the program in 2000, nearly 400,000 people have participated in Healthy NY. Uninsured individuals and sole proprietors who meet income requirements and small business employers with 50 or fewer workers and with at least 30 percent of their employees earning $36,500 or less per year are eligible for the program.

In the Westchester area, the state program had 10,291 enrollees in June 2007, an 11 percent increase from the previous year. Yet the Healthy NY option has been underused and underexposed, Michaels said. “If you were a sole proprietor or small business guy just starting out and needed medical insurance, and you heard about Healthy NY, you”™d never find it,” he said. “It”™s buried in the morass of Web sites in New York State.”

“It”™s aimed at the working poorer,” Michaels said. “But in hard economic times like this, it”™s a program that I think all employers, especially the not-for-profits, should look at.”

Michaels said the Business Council in May will host a workshop on the Healthy NY program for insurance brokers. New marketing materials for the state insurance program have been prepared and will be posted on the Business Council and Michaels and Associates Web sites, he said.

“Our goal is to have 250 sole proprietors who didn”™t have medical insurance before on the plan,” by Oct. 1, Michaels said. “Our second goal is to introduce Healthy NY into every not-for-profit in Westchester that can qualify. The smaller not-for-profits, those poor people are stretching dollars in every single direction.”

Sole proprietors make up about 10 percent of Business Council membership, which numbers more than 1,200, said Business Council President and CEO Marsha Gordon. Nonprofit agencies make up about 9 percent of membership, she said.

Healthy NY premiums are lower than other individual and small group policies because the state makes “stop?loss” reimbursement payments to health plans that cover 90 percent of all claims between $5,000 and $75,000 per enrollee. State officials said the program, as one of the few state insurance programs to rely on that mechanism to subsidize premiums, is considered a model for private health insurance expansion initiatives.

Still some 900,000 New Yorkers are uninsured yet eligible for public health insurance coverage, according to grant-making officials at the New York State Health Foundation. An additional 1.3 million state residents are uninsured but do not qualify for public health insurance, according to the foundation, which was established in 2006 with charitable funds resulting from the conversion of Empire Blue Cross-Blue Shield from a nonprofit organization to a for-profit corporation.

“In order to solve the issue of working poor who don”™t have insurance, it”™s going to take the combined effort of different organizations to do that,” Michaels said.