Gov. Sherrill was overwhelmingly elected because she ran on affordability. She can keep that promise by tackling one of the fastest‑growing and least sustainable costs facing NJEA members and school districts: health insurance. Skyrocketing premiums and medical expenses are straining members’ paychecks, district finances and the state budget. Controlling those costs is essential to making New Jersey more affordable for everyone who lives and works here.
But shifting costs onto the public employees who keep our schools running would be the opposite of affordability. Like so many working families, New Jersey’s teachers, custodians, bus drivers, librarians and other school staff already make too little and pay too much. Forcing us to pay more for health care would contradict the governor’s campaign commitment. Affordability requires a focus on reforms that control costs at their source rather than shifting them onto families.
We know what the wrong approach looks like. Cowardly cost shifting was Chris Christie’s approach when he and the Legislature imposed astronomical premium increases on public employees while doing nothing to control their growth. His supporters in the hospital, pharmaceutical and health insurance industries were thrilled because their profits kept growing unchecked. But New Jersey families paid the price of protecting corporate profits. We want to work with Gov. Sherrill to fashion pro-worker, pro-family solutions that identify the real drivers of health insurance costs and implement creative reforms that make health insurance affordable for everyone who needs it.
We’ve done it before. In 2020, we partnered with legislative leaders and the Murphy administration on legislation that dramatically lowered the cost of health insurance for school employees while still providing high-quality coverage. Our members paid less in premiums and so did school districts, which saved money for all New Jersey taxpayers, to the tune of nearly half a billion dollars in just the first three years. No one lost access to health insurance or had to go without critical medical care because of that reform. And no family covered by that law saw their health insurance costs rise faster than their income. It was a win-win-win solution that shows what we can accomplish when we come together as partners rather than approaching the problem as adversaries.
It’s time to do it again because the 2020 reforms, successful as they were, left loopholes that insurance companies have learned to exploit. Private insurers have swooped in to cover profitable, lower-risk districts, leaving the state to cover districts with higher risk and greater costs. That creates a negative feedback loop where the state plan increases at unsustainable rates, driving more districts out and creating a patchwork environment where districts must fend for themselves with little leverage to drive down costs.
There is a better way. While no school district in New Jersey is large enough to fight back on its own, all New Jersey districts together would have the size and power to take on that fight. It’s time to consider what we could do if we pooled – statewide or regionally – the purchasing power of nearly 600 districts that insure more than 600,000 individuals, including retirees covered by the state. A plan that large would be able to fight back against the price gouging that drains the state’s coffers and workers’ paychecks.
Gov. Sherrill has identified the right problem. We are ready to help implement the right solutions.
NOTE: NJEA President Steve Beatty published a longer version of this in nj.com on March 9, 2026.