A MiddleWeb Blog
Today we’re going to discuss the most alluring of topics possible for teachers: health insurance. (Please, please, stay with me.)
As we all know, rising health costs are bludgeoning Americans now, with even worse sticker shock in the near future. It took a meeting with my union president, though, for me to understand the full importance of this trend for teachers. Our health insurance coverage is almost always negotiated, not simply offered as part of an employment package. But yours may be.
The good news about this is that we have much more voice in how our coverage looks than others do; we have a strong say in how our districts respond to this harmful environment for us.
The bad news is that health insurance is VERY BORING.
Nonetheless! While it’s very tempting to put lesson planning, copier toner, and grading far over and above taking a dive into our health insurance, I am here to tell you that it is one of most important things you can do as a teacher – worth at least two of your planning periods or more. Why? Because you can’t teach if you’re dead.
I’m overstating the case here, obviously. But am I? Teachers have similar contact rates as nurses with our germy young “patients,” but don’t wear protective gear. We don’t work in sanitized environments – in fact schools are often considered sickness “hot spots,” as we all know painfully from the pandemic. Ventilation and air conditioning/extreme heat issues also plague roughly half of our school buildings.
Our high stress environments also plausibly contribute to getting sick more. Teachers also work more while sick, often citing the lack of substitutes or guilt for passing on instructional burdens to other teachers, which then increases sickness exposure to other staff.
Finally, as proven by a set of federal statistics that probably shouldn’t have surprised me but did, teaching can be simply very unsafe: “Violence against school teachers occurred at a rate of 20.0 cases per 10,000 workers in 2021–22, higher than the rate for all occupations… Falls, slips, and trips among teachers occurred at a rate of 31.8 cases per 10,000 workers compared to 36.3 cases for all occupations.” I tend to think of violence in school as an isolated event, in the same way I think of a fall down the middle school stairs as a temporary annoyance caused by me trying to carry seven bags at once. These numbers prove, chillingly, that this is not the case.
Teachers need good health insurance – arguably more than most.
So how can you get it and/or preserve it, in these times where premiums for teachers are tripling in some places, and are responsible for driving teachers out of the profession completely in others? Without rage quitting in the middle of a 50-page insurance packet in eight point font to go get ice cream, I mean. Which I have never done.
Here are the four steps.
1. If you don’t know what your health plan is, call HR and find out. Districts usually have dedicated, unsung heroes in their HR offices who handle health insurance. If you’re nice to them they will usually bend over backwards to help you figure out what your current situation is. If you’re short on time, ask them two things: a) “What medical costs does my plan cover?” AND b) “How much of my insurance costs does the District cover for me?” These are two DIFFERENT questions with very important answers.
2. Know the exact amount you pay each year for health insurance. This is the answer to question B above. If you walk away from this article with only one number confirmed, this is the one.
3. Follow that up with a visit to the health insurance’s home page. Set up an account for online access to your plan’s documentation if you haven’t done so already (and make the username and password the same ones you use to get onto your school computer). When you get to something in the documentation you don’t understand (and you will), call THEIR nice employees who do this sort of explaining to normal people for a living.
4. Know where you are in your contract negotiations cycle. In my district we’re negotiating a new contract in 2026, and you better believe that health insurance costs will be the priority to figure out. Districts will want to do this with as minimal disruption as possible. That’s laudable, but it can also lead to secrecy, murkiness and dishonesty by omission. You can make sure that doesn’t happen by being informed and clear-eyed about your health insurance now.
Optional steps include
5. Get your head around Medicare, even if you’re not eligible for it yet. Medicare coverage is often a key component of teacher contracts both for current and retired employees.
6. Understand what your state is doing to address the healthcare crisis. Different states are responding to the challenges of our federal government in different ways; if you’re keeping up to date on your state’s moves, you’ll automatically cover what the national status is.
What are you doing to negotiate the healthcare crisis within your schools?* I’d truly love to hear. Leave a comment.
*Note this article was published 11-23-25. The particulars of America’s (and teachers’) health insurance are changing constantly in our current chaotic political environment. Stay alert!
Image above by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay.
Feature image by Fakhruddin Memon from Pixabay
