The first step West Virginia needs to take on costs of the Public Employees Insurance Agency is identify the problem, House Speaker Roger Hanshaw says. And the main issue, he says, is a broad trend of medical cost inflation.

“We have a medical inflation problem nationally, and that that’s what we’re grappling with. We aren’t grappling with a, per se, broken plan. We aren’t grappling with underfunding. We’re grappling with medical inflation nationally,” Hanshaw, R-Clay, said this week on MetroNews Talkline.

“It’s not an easy issue for us to tackle, because we want to be a good employer,” he said, referring to the public employees who receive benefits through the state health insurance agency.

That doesn’t sound promising for a proposed special session focusing on changes to PEIA, which c

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