The Columbus Police Department plans to spend $40,000 more on medical services in 2021 to cover the cost of physical exams for officers.
In 2020, the department budgeted $10,000 for medical services. In the 2021 budget presented to city council on Sept. 2, $50,000 was budgeted for medical services.
CPD Chief Mike Richardson said that this increase covers the cost of giving officers physical exams through Public Safety Medical, the same company that does physicals for the Columbus Fire Department.
“It will be cheaper for the fire department, because we’ll be adding all of our officers to doing it as well, so they’re going to give the fire department a cheaper rate than what they’ve done in the past,” Richardson said. “And our rate will be a little bit cheaper than what the fire department’s been paying, because of the number of people that will be going through that process.”
He added that adding the cost of physicals to the budget will hopefully help decrease “skyrocketing” insurance costs by diagnosing conditions early. The department’s actuals for insurance benefits were about $1.08 million in 2018 and about $1.26 million in 2019.
The 2020 budgeted amount was about $1.46 million. The 2021 budgeted amount is $1.52 million, which is a noticeably smaller increase than the previous years, presumably in anticipation of lower costs.
Richardson said that while the fire department has been doing officer physicals for years, 2021 will be the first year the police department does so. In the past, CPD officers were not given physicals unless they chose to get one done by their own health care provider.
“A lot of officers do not get their annual physical, so this would be something that would be not quite as in-depth, but it would be a physical that they would be able to find out if there’s something going on,” he said.
