The Office of Personnel Management is in the doghouse, not only with members of Congress but also with federal employees and retirees. The reason? Skyrocketing premiums for long-term care insurance.

According to a report in the Washington Post, there has yet to be any action by OPM toward stabilizing the LTC program for federal employees—despite the fact that members of Congress demanded to know what OPM was going to do about premium hikes of as much as 126 percent.

Just a few days after Thanksgiving, the report says, Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-VA), the top Democrat on a House government operations subcommittee, pushed to get an answer from John O’Brien, then OPM’s director of health care and insurance under the Obama administration, about what OPM planned to do to avoid another such debacle.

The coverage, for purchase by federal employees and retirees, is provided by the John Hancock Life and Health Insurance Co., “with questionable OPM oversight.”

O’Brien, however, did not provide a satisfactory answer at the hearing, and is quoted in the report saying instead, “We do not have a proposal that is ready for being shared with the committee at this time. The options and the discussion that has been offered around here goes in a number of different directions. We would like to evaluate those possibilities and come to this committee and this group with a proposal that we could really play out and we’ve weighed all the pros and cons, and we have not yet done that.”

O’Brien declined to provide a timeline on when that might be done, and Connolly, along with Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), sent a letter Thursday—205 days later—asking OPM when it will have a plan to protect long-term care enrollees from sudden and dramatic premium increases. The letter said that, since O’Brien’s answers “were not sufficient,” OPM must provide more detail.

In part, the letter said, “in order to avoid premium price shock each time there is a new FLTCIP (Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program) contract, we must have an understanding of how OPM plans to address these urgent matters going forward.”

Urgent? Hardly, since OPM issued a statement saying, “OPM has received the letter, and we are reviewing it. OPM does not have anything additional to add at this time.” This after an agency spokesperson declined to say what, if anything, OPM might have done to stabilize the program since the November hearing.

And although there were about 274,000 people in the program last year, the agency deferred even basic questions concerning the number of people currently in the program.

Needless to say, that does not make Congress happy. Connolly is quoted in the report saying, “The utter fecklessness of that office and having no answers, no recommendations, no reforms, no proposals is astounding, and a terrible disservice to the federal employees and retirees who counted on this service.”

Government retirees in the LTC program are also furious over the way the situation is (not) being handled, criticizing the premium hikes and the options that were available last year.

Of course, LTC premiums aren’t the only reason Democrats and federal employees are hopping mad—the other is the plan to slash the latter’s retirement benefits as spelled out in the administration’s budget. In fact, in an effort led by Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) and Connolly, Beyer and more than 100 House Democrats, also signed a letter opposing the Trump administration’s planned cuts to federal retirement programs.

Instant Insights /

Still no action on long-term care price hikes from OPM

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