To be a Jewish educator in Milwaukee can mean having to work at several different sites, thereby putting in a full-time job’s worth of hours. But because one is considered a part-time employee at each location, one does not qualify for such employment benefits as health insurance.
But that situation will soon change, and in a way that could be a pioneering project for Jewish communities in the country.
Nearly every institution in Milwaukee’s Jewish community will now be part of one group benefit plan. On Dec. 29, the board of directors for a new organization that comprises those institutions chose Humana, Inc., as its health insurance provider.
And one of the effects of this will be to enable teachers working part-time for several Jewish organizations to combine their hours into a full-time job equivalent and thereby qualify for health insurance benefits.
“This is something we’ve been advocating for many years,” said Steven Baruch, Ph.D., executive director of the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the education program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. “This is a big step toward the professionalization of Jewish teaching.”
But Jewish education teachers will not be the only or even the primary beneficiaries.
Every employer and employee in the participating 25 organizations stands to gain, according to the president of the Wisconsin Jewish Group Benefits Plan board, Bruce Ente, who is also executive director of Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun, one of the participating institutions.
This organization, being “a collective of the Jewish agencies in Milwaukee,” Ente said in an interview at his Emanu-El office, “has more leverage in the insurance market than any individual [organization].”
“We have seven employees here [at Emanu-El]. What leverage do we have? Zero or less,” Ente said.
As a member of the WJGBP, however, Emanu-El’s seven will be part of a group of some 400 likely participants out of a potential of some 700 (of which, Ente said, some are likely to opt out or be covered in other ways).
That will bring costs down and enable the extension of coverage to such employees as the part-time teachers mentioned above, he said.
Rare collaboration
But of even more significance to Ente is the number and range of Jewish organizations participating in this effort. They include:
• Synagogues from Reconstructionist (Congregation Shir Hadash) to haredi Orthodox (Congregation Beth Jehudah).
• Service organizations from cultural (Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center) to social service/therapeutic (Jewish Family Services) to religious (Lubavitch of Wisconsin) to community relations (Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations).
• Educational institutions from all the day schools to those serving adults (Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning and the Milwaukee Kollel Center for Jewish Studies).
• And, of course, the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, which also will “provide the resources to administer the overall program without a charge to the participants,” said Richard H. Meyer, MJF executive vice president.
“In a dramatic way, we’re actually acting like a community,” in a fashion that is “perhaps too rare a phenomenon” in the U.S. Jewish community, said Ente. “I do think this will have a salutary effect on the Jewish community as a whole. All of us are more than any one of us.”
Meyer agreed that creation of the WJGBP is “an important first step in collaboration and cooperation among agencies, organizations and synagogues; and hopefully it will lead to greater opportunity to coordinate other communal benefits.”
The idea for this project came from Tobey Libber, program officer for the “Jewish Life and Learning” branch of the Helen Bader Foundation. In a telephone interview, Libber said the concept was inspired by his experiences as planning director of the MJF, where he worked for eight years.
“Every year, I would review the budgets of all the agencies that receive funding from the annual campaign,” Libber said. “I grew increasingly alarmed at the high percentage of agency budgets that were consumed by health benefits for employees.”
In his position at the Bader Foundation, where he has worked until 2002, Libber began to wonder, “Was there a way that I could bring all the Jewish organizations together and have them be part of one health insurance plan that would allow, especially the smaller organizations, but all of them the opportunity to save money on health care premium costs, provide better benefits for employees because of better bargaining as a large group; and, most important of all, show Jewish community employees how much they are valued in the work they do by providing them with good benefits at a reasonable price.”
So about two years ago, Libber started meeting with representatives of the various local Jewish organizations. He also worked with Brian Leibl, the chief financial officer of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, and Lisa Hiller, the vice president of administration at the Bader Foundation and a certified employee benefits specialist.
With the help of a $40,000 grant from the Bader Foundation, “We put together a team of experts who helped us put together a proposal,” said Libber. These experts included insurance industry people Scott Coleman of Frank F. Haack & Associates and Steve Werner of Stephen L. Werner and Associates; and attorney Harvey A. Kurtz, a partner at the law firm of Foley & Lardner, LLP.
Kurtz said his role was to find the “legal framework” for the plan. Milwaukee’s Jewish community is making innovative use of a relatively new federal law in creating this group: the “Church Plan Parity and Entanglement Prevention Act,” signed by President Clinton in 2000.
This law states that a group of religious institutions can combine to offer benefits as a single employer and not be subject to state laws that would otherwise govern multiple employer arrangements.
“That’s the cornerstone of the whole program,” said Kurtz. “Without that law, we couldn’t have gotten the insurance companies to treat us as a single employer.”
Kurtz added, “It is extremely important that the agencies cooperate and act like a single employer in certain ways.” And the Milwaukee Jewish agencies “have done a really excellent job of working together in that regard. It’s been an amazing process.”
Moreover, “this is cutting edge stuff,” said Libber, adding that only the Columbus, Ohio, and Atlanta Jewish communities have so far attempted to do anything even similar to this.
The board of directors, which Libber said had its first meeting six to eight weeks ago, comprises nine people. As Ente explained, six of them represent the six largest employers (with more than 50 employees each): the JCC, JFS, the Jewish Home and Care Center, Lubavitch, the Milwaukee Jewish Day School and the federation.
Two members represent the six mid-size employer agencies (10 to 49 employees) and one represents the 13 participating agencies with fewer than 10 employees.
Ente also said that even though the participating agencies all come from Milwaukee at present, there is a reason that the word Wisconsin was put in the organization’s name.
“We recognize that there is a potential to expand beyond Milwaukee, so we incorporated with that in mind,” he said. But that is a vision for the future, he said: “We need to get together and be solidly functioning in Milwaukee; then we can expand outward.”
Ente also said there was a reason the organization is called a “benefit” rather than “insurance” plan. “There might be other employee benefits” that the group may offer later on, he said.
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