HARBISON: UNL disrespecting faculty with university-wide health audit

Last Friday I received a letter from a company called Chapman Kelly, of Jeffersonville, Ind., offering me, on behalf of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, something I have never been offered before: amnesty. Chapman Kelly noted that I have two "dependents" on my health insurance, to wit, one spouse and one son. In a nice "we know where you live" touch, they included my son's date of birth. Take these people off your health insurance, the university said via their paid enforcer, and we won't subject you to disciplinary action, or mulct you for what we already spent on your dependents' health insurance. If you persist, expect to provide as yet unspecified documentary records that your wife is actually your wife, and your son is indeed a "natural-born" son.

Don't worry; it's not that they particularly hate your devoted columnist (though, come to think of it, they probably do hate me a bit); the entire faculty and staff is getting these shakedown letters.

Well, how do you react to someone who suggests that you may not actually be legally married to your spouse? History records how our seventh president dealt with the problem. Relax: I don't condone or intend to emulate Andy Jackson's distinctive way of dealing with insults to his or his wife's honor. Times have changed, so call off the UNL threat response team. (Besides, Jackson, a fine shot, nonetheless died with several bullets still lodged in his body.) But of course I feel insulted. I've been working for UNL for 18 years; my spouse has taught here longer than I, and it's not as if our marriage is a mystery; it was conducted at City Hall, with notices printed in the local paper. And it's not just curmudgeonly old Professor Harbison who's ticked off; several colleagues, most of them far calmer than I, have told me they feel insulted.

But, as any Husker would, I swallowed my pride and once again offered to go the extra mile for Big Red. Sure, I'm listed on my son's birth certificate, but does that prove he's actually my native-born son? I'm confident he is, but UNL deserves certainty. So I offered them a matched father-and-son pair of cheek swabs for DNA testing, or even to go down to Varner Hall with my son and let them collect swabs themselves at some mutually convenient time. (Who knows, there might well be a black market in fake cheek swabs, as there is for drug free urine.) Let the record show that Harvey has not yet responded to my handsome offer.

This dependent-eligibility audit thang is a fad, but it's become more urgent with the passage of Obamacare. See, once we get to 2014, "grandfathered" health plans — and they all want to be grandfathered — will find it very difficult to drop coverage for anyone, and so they want to clean out the moochers now. The University of St. Thomas, wherever that is, found that about 1 percent of their covered dependents were removed from the system following a similar amnesty offer. About 1 percent more were "incompletely documented," and 2 percent just didn't send the forms in, though some might have been planning to quit anyway. This 4 percent removal rate covered the dollar cost of the audit and saved them a few hundred thousand a year. The University of Colorado, apparently a more dishonest place, removed almost 6 percent of their dependents following an amnesty offer and knocked another 7 percent off the rolls for insufficient compliance. It makes me feel dirty we used to play them every year.

There are intangible costs as well. For example, the time we all are going to waste digging out documentation; tedious enough if you're American, but imagine if you hailed from Uzbekistan and had a child in Germany. And interestingly, at Colorado, news coverage of the audit was surprisingly negative; it frequently cast the faculty as a bunch of grifting sleazeballs. Sure, the university thought that — that's why they ran the audit — but I don't think they wanted the news getting out to the taxpayers.

Chapman Kelly obligingly documents the entire "process" on their website, dependentcheck.com/audit-guide/. It's an interesting read. From the section on "employee culture:"

"For example, a company that has a ‘family' atmosphere, where trusting an employee's word has been an integral part of the company history, you may not want to impose strong consequences such as fines or disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment, for an employee who did not comply with the process."

I guess we strike out on "family atmosphere." Darn.

"...if the goal of your audit is simply to remove ineligible dependents from the plan(s) and not to create ‘hard feelings' among employees, it may be best to use a softer approach that encourages the employee to come forward at any point of the process and voluntarily remove an ineligible dependent."

Creating hard feelings is apparently not a concern at UNL. However, the threatened "disciplinary action by the university" may be just a bluff…

"A compromise may be to include language of possible consequences in multiple audit communications, thereby making the employees aware of possible action regardless of your intent to follow through on them."

Finally:

"Be aware that most employees will find this audit intrusive and will be confused as this is the first time most of them have experienced anything like this. The more you communicate with your population, the better your results and relationship will be. We suggest a minimum of three forms of initial communication prior to the launch of your audit."

By my count, we got one terse mass e-mail from Harvey. So much for the relationship.