- May 20, 2026
The Flagler County School Board, desperate to lower health insurance costs, approved a new employee health care plan on Tuesday, May 19, which uses a non-traditional network replacement model.
The plan, which has been approved by both unions, replaces Florida Blue with HealthScope Benefits, a third party administrator owned by United Health Group.
“It’s essentially no network,” said Joshua Walker, Flagler Schools Human Resources chief. “It’s open access.”
The new model gives the school district the ability to reimburse medical claims on a transparent “cost-plus” basis. HealthScope Benefits partners with ClaimDoc, a medical claim auditing and member advocacy company that supports self-funded health plans. ClaimDOC reviews medical bills for accuracy, applies transparent reimbursement standards and advocates on behalf of members to help resolve billing issues and protect against inappropriate charges.
Without a plan change, the district faced a projected 22% renewal increase in premiums. And the current plan has depleted the district’s insurance fund. Because of high claims, the district overage is about $800,000, Walker said.
“Anything that we have to pay that is not in the insurance fund, we would have to take out of the general fund, which is why, when we went to establish rates for 2026-27, we knew we had to make sure we did it in a responsible way that puts money back into the insurance fund,” Walker said.
In her closing comments at the School Board’s business meeting, board member Janie Ruddy said the transition “will require us all to think differently about how we engage with our health insurance, but I have full faith in our team to help educate our staff, as well as the quality of the program that we've selected to support our staff in order to meet their health care needs.”
Walker said the district, partnering with broker Brown & Brown, looked at the landscape for bold ways to reinvent what the district’s health insurance would look like moving forward.
“We were able to go outside the norm of a regular network into direct access to care, and we're going to continue to try and educate our employees on what that's going to look like between now and when the plan year starts Sept. 1,” he said.
The board agreed to contribute 5.16% more toward the insurance fund with an overall funding increase of 4%, according to Brown & Brown’s presentation at the May 19 afternoon School Board workshop. The aggregate employee contributions will not increase.
“Health care as we know it is broken,” Ruddy said at the workshop. “But here’s cause for celebration. You'd be hard pressed to find any other organization in this environment not drastically increasing their cost of premiums.”
The board also accomplished its goal of offering more affordable coverage for employees to cover their children. In the new gold plan, which replaces the base plan, the premium for an employee plus children is $196.88 per pay period, down from the current cost of $452.58.
There will be three plans to choose from instead of the current four — the basic gold plan; the HSA, or high deductible plan; and the platinum plan, which replaces the standard and premium plans.
Board member Will Furry said health insurance is one of the most challenging areas the board is tasked with.
“We had a very collaborative executive session, bargaining with unions, coming up with compromise,” he said. “This year I think we did something great. It’s not only more transparent, but accessible for the children. And now [employees] can go anywhere they want. We’re not tied to a network.”
But those on the health plan will have to be better stewards with their health care, he added, such as using the district’s wellness center and not going to the emergency room unless it’s really an emergency.
“We're going to work with employees to provide education on what this looks like,” Walker said. “There may become a time when they want to go to a certain facility that may be charging more than a certain threshold, but we would work with them and ClaimDoc to find care that meets their needs at an affordable level.”
