Hugh Hewitt
For whom the bell really tolls
By: Hugh Hewitt
Examiner Columnist
June 15, 2009
Teachers aren’t going to get rich spending years in the classroom, but those who teach in the public schools have traditionally had excellent benefits, including excellent health insurance.
Few begrudge teachers their generally superb health benefits, and teachers’ unions have made the establishment and preservation of strong health benefit packages a key component of their negotiations with school districts.
The objective has been high quality benefits at little or no cost to the teachers. Just last week a study in New Jersey revealed that only 12% of the Garden State’s teachers pay anything towards their health care.
The enormous number of school districts in the U.S. make national data hard to assemble, but few would dispute that American medicine is generally available in all of its amazing glory to America’s public school teachers.
A similar situation holds true for most public employees at the state and local level, and most certainly it is true at the federal level, where the Federal Employees Health Benefits system (“FEHB”) has long been the platinum standard for health insurance coverage.
An annual “open season” allows federal employees to pick the best coverage option for their changing life needs, and the taxpayer subsidy is generous. You don’t get rich as a fed, but if you get sick, you do get quality care.
Teachers and other public employees have lots to lose if the so-called “government option” or “public option” provisions of the draft health care bills circulating on the Hill survive. The Obama/Pelosi/Reid wing of the Democratic Party is committed to the proposition that the government should be the provider of health insurance to everyone who needs it.
Which bodes great ill for teachers especially and probably for all local and state employees of any jurisdiction feeling the budget pinch. (Expect the Congressmen to protect their own plans and those of other federal employees through continued massive subsidies for the FEHB.)
School districts and governmental units looking for ways to trim budgets will soon see before them an opportunity to off-load the burden of health care decisions (and at least future cost increases) by dumping their teachers into the “government option.”
One of the arguments long used against the “government option” has been the obvious magnet it would be to private sector employers eager to dump the health care costs of their workforces on to the feds.
Those currently covered employees might –might—continue to get their existing health benefits, or they might get shifted into the government plan with its fixed and predictable costs, or the employers might just elect to pay the “penalty tax” that Congress is threatening to impose on employers who don’t provide coverage, and waive goodbye to the whole expensive and time-consuming process of insuring their work force.
Every single private employer is going to have to make the calculation of what serves their bottom lines best, and for many that will mean the warehouse insurance of the “government option.”
What teachers and other public employees have to realize is that the same calculation will be in front of every school district and agency struggling to make ends meet. If the federal government’s benefits plan costs a public employer only $1,000 per month for employee and family and the current health benefits package costs the school district of the city council $1,300 a month per employee and family, why wouldn’t the decision makers get out of the benefits business and shift their entire workforces to the federal plan?
Some public employees won’t fear this trend, and will tell themselves that such savings will translate into increased pay or other benefits, but they are fooling themselves. The American voter expects the public employees that serve them to be insured, and they generally support generous health benefits.
But they won’t support rising wages and other fringe benefits as a replacement for the health insurance burden shifted to the feds. And when the federal bureaucrats charged with keeping the costs of the “public option” under control and they do so by limiting treatment options, the public employees long used to the best medicine available will be able to look back at 2009 and ask themselves (and their union representatives): What were we thinking?
Examiner columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
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