Designed Just For You

By Amir Zaman
WEA Insurance
employee benefits specialist

September 1999

Trusts were created to serve WEAC members

What better time than the beginning of the school year to explain the benefits and services WEAC’s insurance programs have to offer, and how these programs fit in with WEAC’s commitment to you?

Two of the programs, the WEA Insurance Trust and the WEAC Member Benefit Trust, are designed to protect the financial well-being of members. They do this by offering group and individual insurance programs that are among the best values in their class. And, of course, being member-driven programs, they do even more.

Health insurance

For example, the WEA Insurance Trust has been working for a number of years to put the “health” back in health insurance. While we realize that part of our value comes from running the business cost-effectively and from keeping an eye on medical costs, we think it’s an even better idea to control costs by having a healthy population. And, by giving members the tools and information they need to become and remain healthy, we believe we can make them some of the healthiest residents of this state.

Personal insurance

Similarly, the Member Benefit Trust provides personal insurance and financial services such as auto and home insurance, long-term care insurance, and an IRA program. While such services are widely available in the marketplace, what’s harder to find is unbiased advice about what members need, and a yardstick they can use for comparison. The Member Benefit Trust offers both these services.

Tax Sheltered Annuity

Our third program, the WEA Tax Sheltered Annuity (TSA) Trust, helps members save for retirement on a pre-tax basis. Public school employees belong to one of the few select groups that can participate in tax-sheltered annuities. The TSA Trust was established to ensure that members are made aware of this opportunity, that they don’t have to pay exorbitant fees to participate in such a program, and that they receive competitive returns on their investments. In fact, the guaranteed rate offered by this Trust has been the best available to educators for many years. And, those members who choose to invest in the stock market will find that their TSA Trust offers a variety of quality options.

If you build it . . .

Do members really need the union’s insurance programs? Isn’t what’s available in the marketplace adequate?

While there are many respectable programs available in the marketplace, the only programs designed for members, by members, and with the members’ best interests at heart, are these Trusts.

Don Krahn, former executive director of WEAC, was director of field services in 1968. He said a welfare committee made up of WEAC members was trying to determine the most effective way to provide members with insurance services. “At that time,” Krahn said, “the practice was that WEAC would endorse certain insurance products for members. But I knew from personal experience as a negotiator in Fort Atkinson that such an approach would never produce great benefits for members.

“Under that arrangement,” Krahn said, “no matter which insurance company we endorsed, or how good a deal the insurer gave members, we could never tell our members that what we had endorsed was the best product for them.”

So, Krahn and the welfare committee looked at alternatives and ultimately decided to go with the idea of an insurance trust, adding two others a few years later. All three Trusts are financially independent of WEAC. While a Board of Trustees appointed by WEAC overseas all programs, no money from the Trusts is returned to WEAC. Rather, the Trusts use excess resources to improve benefits, lower premiums, and assure that finances are more than adequate to handle any claims now and in the future.

Posted August 24, 1999