Opening the Wapato Jail

My open letter to Lars Larson:

Lars, I promised to give you (and Dianne Linn) a way to open the Wapato Jail by finding $16 million in savings in the Multnomah County budget.

The bad news is, the county didn't do performance budgeting the correct way this year, which made their budget all but unreadable for my purposes. I've had to take another tack.

The good news is, I have found some ways to free up the $16 million.

The first step is to save money while IMPROVING the healthcare outcomes of Multnomah County's 4,470 workers: switch them to Healthcare Savings Accounts.

A friend and fellow consultant, Sil Pienovi, tells me he helped institute an HRA/HSA type plan at one of his client companies, and reduced total cash out by 20%. Where traditional third-party-payer insurance costs are rising at 12-15% a year, HSA costs are rising only 5% a year.

Seattle healthcare consultant Kathleen O'Connor says that fully 50 cents of every healthcare dollar spent does NOT go to patient care - so the HSA savings are NOT coming from the workers. They are coming from the insurers and from inefficiencies in the old system.

My plan is simple: Move county workers to a HSA plan, such that a portion of the saved money will go to the jail, and a portion will go into their own HSA cash account. If each one saves the taxpayer just $200 a month, that's $894,000 a month x 12 months = $10.728 million the first year.

Furthermore, healthcare costs are projected forward by the county several years - they are budgeting for that 15% increase in costs. By holding the increase to 5% we save a COMPOUNDING 10% a year.

Step two: have the police union (or some other voluntary private police organization) take over the Police Standards and Practices board, saving $1 million.

Step three: stop subsidizing tenants when leasing out county owned buildings, saving $500,000 a year.

Step four: sell off some of the unused county buildings and land, putting them back on the tax rolls and using the one-time cash to tide us over until the 10% compound growth from Step One brings us above $16 million a year.

I have a hatful of other fixes that can be used to extend the power of the county's spending on human services, but they take a lot longer to explain, and I think this does the trick.

What do you think?