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Skidmore’s Benefits/Human Resources Team continuously strives to ensure the College’s healthcare benefits are attractive, flexible and provide choice to support the needs of employees and their families. The Team engages in initiatives to address emerging trends, manage costs, and ensure access which benefits both employees and the College who share in the cost of Skidmore’s healthcare expenses. These initiatives may result in plan design changes, program enhancements or other activities to improve the benefits experience while managing costs. Some activities also align with prudent business practices and due diligence including benchmarking and market checks to ensure that the plan offerings, funding arrangements and account services are competitive and align to current marketplace standards. 

Recent initiatives include the following: 

Market Checks:

  • Medical (2023): The College released a Request for Proposal for the Medical plan. An analysis of proposals determined MVP continues to be best vendor choice for the College, offering the most attractive financial arrangements, provider network and account service support. Continuing with MVP resulted in no disruption to existing provider relationships for employees and their dependents while reducing the plan’s administrative fees.

  • Vision (2023): The College released a Request for Quotes for a voluntary vision plan. The College currently offers vision coverage through its health plan. Vendors would not offer a stand-alone voluntary plan unless vision coverage was removed from the health plans, negatively impacting many employees and their dependents. A popular option for additional vision expenses is for employees to utilize the Flexible Spending Account option.

  • Dental (2024): The College released a Request for Quotes for the dental plan to confirm the premium rates and funding options are competitive. Continuing with Delta Dental resulted in no disruption to existing provider relationships for employees and their dependents while maintaining current rates for 2025.

  • Benefits Peer Review (2024 and 2025): Segal consultants provided updated reviews of current benefits compared to NY6 peer institutions. Skidmore’s plan design is more generous than the comparable designs of all of the other New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium schools. This benchmark data contributes to making benefit changes that allow Skidmore to remain competitive offering rich benefits in the PPO plan while aligning with the marketplace, for example for 2026, discontinuing future enrollments in the EPO plan and providing a benefit enhancement by reducing the High-Deductible Health Plan (HDHP) out of pocket maximum.

  • EPO plan (2025): After careful analysis, Skidmore has decided to discontinue further enrollments into the EPO MVP health plan option. As the EPO and PPO MVP health plans have adjusted over time, there are now minimal differences between the options and employees are overwhelmingly selecting the PPO and HDHP plans. The PPO plan offers out-of-network coverage not available to EPO plan participants. This change will streamline benefits communication and enrollment processes with new and current employees, as well as increase efficiency between plan participants and MVP. Approximately 45 employees are currently enrolled in the EPO plan, After the fall 2025 Open Enrollment period, Skidmore will assess EPO plan enrollment during 2026 to determine whether the plan will continue to be offered in 2027.

  • Skidmore participates in a pharmacy coalition comprised of a group of higher education institutions that have banded together to gain purchasing power and negotiating strength. Within the coalition, price negotiation and periodic reviews of our pharmacy benefit manager arrangement are performed.

FAQS-General Questions

 

Human Resources conducts regular benchmarking and analysis on all of our employee benefit policies and programs. In the fall of each year, Human Resources collaborates with college leadership on the projected costs and potential plan design adjustments to address the budget implications. Healthcare costs are anticipated to be an ongoing challenge. As a result, the work surrounding how to best manage our healthcare plan offerings and costs will be ongoing work well into the future.

The College is mindful of the trends in higher education, and in particular, at private, liberal arts colleges such that the number of students that require financial aid in order to attend continues to increase. Additionally, there are negative demographic trends related to the number of college going students as we look towards the future. Skidmore is not immune to these issues and trends. This means that the future trajectory of revenue versus expenses at Skidmore is not positive, and therefore creative, and proactive measures are important to keeping Skidmore’s financial position strong.

Extremely favorable. The Healthcare Working Group considered a large amount of comparison data as part of its work in 2019-2021.  Data comparing Skidmore’s plan to our peer/aspirant institutions was also shared with the IPPC and the broader community in the spring of 2019.  For example, we know that Skidmore’s current plan design is more generous than the comparable designs of all of the other New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium schools. Data from this group was revisited in 2024 with the same result. 

Please note that beyond the “New York Six” we have also benchmarked Skidmore’s health plan against other peer and aspirant schools such as Vassar College, Middlebury College, Davidson College, Bowdoin College, and other members of the group known as the “Colgate Group” of competitive liberal arts schools.  Additionally, we have benchmarked against other higher education institutions in the New York capital region.  The result of these additional comparison is essentially the same i.e. Skidmore’s plan design is more generous and employees pay a lower average cost share than our peer and aspirant institutions. 

No. Faculty and staff salaries are not below market. The College regularly benchmarks faculty and staff salaries data against peer and aspirant institutions to ensure that we offer competitive compensation. For staff positions this may also include benchmarking to regional employers.

A summary of the Healthcare Working Group’s efforts and resulting plan design changes can be found here. This includes the detailed presentation that was shared with the entire college employee community.

Premiums and Employee Cost Sharing

 

Because Skidmore’s healthcare plan is a self-insured one, as opposed to a fully-insured one, the College does not pay premiums to a vendor to provide healthcare coverage to faculty and staff. Instead, the College pays claims costs as they are incurred. We see MVP on our insurance cards, and this is because MVP administers our plan (but is not our insurer). The advantages of having a self-insured plan include having great flexibility over plan design and eliminating the profit that would need be paid to an insurer thereby saving the College money.

One big disadvantage of a self-insured plan, however, is the volatility of claims’ expenses (both in terms of quantity and severity). We take steps to mitigate this volatility, namely as it related to high-cost claims, by having stop loss insurance. With stop loss insurance, when a single claim exceeds a pre-determined amount, that insurance covers those excess claims costs.

Since the College is not paying a premium to an insurance vendor, the College must instead calculate what is known as a premium equivalent rate. This calculation is done in order to establish cost sharing – specifically, what share of the healthcare plan’s cost is to be covered by the College and what share of the cost is to be covered by the employee. Premium equivalent rates should align closely with our plan’s actual cost, thereby reflecting reality. When premium equivalent rates are set in the fall, at open enrollment time for implementation on January 1st, we must approximate the years healthcare costs based on actual year-to-date claims and estimated claims for the balance of the year.

In recent years, actual healthcare claims costs have risen at rates that are greater than that of our premium equivalent rates. For the current year, for example, the College committed to capping premium equivalent rate increases at 6%, despite the data indicating that to be reflective of actual plan cost, an increase of 13% would have been more in line with reality.

This will not be known until early in the fall as the premium equivalent rates are based upon our actual claims experience.

The General Salary Adjustment (GSA) is not linked to healthcare insurance, it is determined as part of the annual operating budget. The cost of healthcare insurance is determined by the overall cost of healthcare, which has been rising steeply nationwide.

As we continue to evaluate our entire healthcare program modest changes have been implemented in the plan design. This includes the addition of medical and prescription deductibles for 2025. The existing primary care physician and specialist visit copays have slightly increased.

Stop loss insurance protects the plan from excess exposure to catastrophic claims. If a claim is in excess of $300,000, the liability for that claim would shift to the stop loss insurance carrier. This has no direct impact on individuals covered by the plan and is completely invisible to participants.

Plan Design

 

A deductible is the amount you pay for covered healthcare services before the insurance plan starts to pay. A deductible will apply to most services except for preventive services, physician office visits, emergency room and urgent care visits.

Coinsurance applies to covered expenses after the deductible is met. It does not apply to services with a fixed copayment such as office visits. For example, if a single employee meets their deductible of $200, then 10% coinsurance would apply up to the out of pocket maximum for the plan year.

Copayments are specific fees for certain types of covered office visits and services e.g. primary care ($25) and specialist ($40) visits. The deductible generally does not apply to these services.

The out of pocket maximum is the maximum amount of financial exposure of an employee under the terms of the plan for covered services. In other words, if an employee reaches the (medical) out of pocket maximum for the plan year, they will not be responsible for additional (medical) charges such as deductible, copays or coinsurance provided that the services are covered under the Plan and are considered allowable expenses by the Plan.

Prescription Drugs

 

Prior Authorization means your doctor will need to submit a PA request for coverage and the request will need to be approved before the medication may be covered under the plan. PA is used to ensure that the medication is medically necessary and appropriate for your situation.

Step Therapy means you may need to try another proven, cost-effective medication before coverage may be available for a prescription drug. Many brand drugs have less-expensive generic or brand alternatives that might be an option for you.

Quantity Limit is a restriction on the amount or quantity of a medication that is covered by the plan during a specific period of time. QL is used to ensure patient safety and control health costs.

Specialty medications are higher-cost medications for the treatment of rare or complex conditions.  They are injectable, infused, oral or inhaled medications that may require close therapy management and monitoring, require special shipping and/or storage needs and may require infusion or home nursing.

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Main: 518-580-5800
Fax: 518-580-5805

Email

hr@skidmore.edu
benefits@skidmore.edu

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Human Resources
Skidmore College
Barrett Center
815 North Broadway
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866

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