UNM's Human Resources Department is re-evaluating some of the benefits it offers full-time employees, faculty members learned last week.
Representatives from Human Resources asked the Faculty Senate's Health and Benefits Committee to examine a long-term-benefits policy that provides health care to employees after they retire.
The benefits are applicable when an employee loses the ability to perform basic functions, such as eating or bathing, said Helen Gonzales, director of Human Resources.
Gonzales said the department asked the Faculty Senate to find out if faculty members were aware they had the benefit and if they wanted to keep it.
Feroza Jussawalla, co-chairwoman of the Faculty Senate's Health and Benefits Committee, said the benefit is important to UNM employees, especially as they age.
"This isn't the kind of benefit you need while you are still 50 years old or 60 years old," she said. "It really does affect the retirees."
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Gonzales said UNM pays insurance companies $700,000 each year to provide the benefit but that few employees take advantage of it.
"Since 1999, there have been nine people who have needed the long-term care," she said. "That doesn't make this a bad benefit; it just means that paying $3.5 million (in the past five years) to get $140,000 in benefits may not be the best business decision. And we may want to spend the $700,000 a year on a different benefit for employees."
Jussawalla said she asked the department to send an e-mail to all faculty members, asking if they were aware of the long-term-care benefit. But she was told Human Resources had already completed a survey and did not want to distribute another one, she said.
"We don't plan to make a change to the benefit at this moment," Gonzales said. "We were looking for input. I'm not sure we've gotten enough input into this issue, because I believe it was misunderstood."
Jussawalla said that if UNM takes away the benefit, employees will have trouble paying their hospital bills later in life if they need long-term care.
"After a certain age, when you try to subscribe to
long-term care, it gets very expensive. The whole process gets a lot harder," she said.
The committee passed a motion stating faculty members do not want the benefit to be taken away.
Gonzales said her intention was not to take the benefit away but to examine how it was being used and to determine if there was a better policy to provide for employees.
"I think it's important for people to know how much we spend and how much we've gotten back, and that it isn't for a lack of knowledge about the benefit," she said. "We were looking at whether it was feasible to continue this as an employer-paid benefit."
Carol Scott Alley, co-founder of the UNM Retiree Association, said the long-term-care benefit is important to UNM retirees and that it would be unwise for Human Resources to take it away.
"I can't imagine that they would cut this for faculty and staff," she said. "The retiree association would lobby to keep benefits like this. UNM is a wonderful place to work, and if they start doing things that would hurt the future of retirees, it's not a moral thing to do."
