Morning Sentinel
State employees' health insurance too good a deal
Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel Sunday, May 27, 2007

Maine state employees don't pay anything for their health insurance -- every cent of the premium is paid by the state.

They do pay 40 percent of the premium to cover their family members, and they also pay a modest deductible.

That's a great deal -- a better deal, probably, than many of the people who actually pay for those premiums -- Maine taxpayers -- get at their jobs.

The days of employers picking up 100 percent of the cost of insurance are long gone. With the advent of double-digit annual increases in premiums some years ago, businesses could no longer afford to cover all of the premium.

Even having the employee pick up 10 or 20 or 30 percent still left the employer with a large annual insurance bill. But the cost-sharing hurt the employee, too, probably cutting into pay raises and limiting the amount the employer could invest back into the business.

Employer and employees have both suffered from the rising costs of health care in the United States.

One solution, a modest one, has been to construct premium sharing in such a way that the consumer of health care (the employee) pays enough of the cost of health care to ensure they make medical care decisions based at least a little bit on costs.

If your employer is paying for your insurance, where's the incentive to keep down the costs of your personal health care by taking better care of yourself, stressing preventive care and even questioning whether you always need that expensive test?

A Republican proposal under consideration would raise the employee share from zero to 15 percent. This is one of many proposals being debated this weekend as the Legislature tries to balance the budget. State employees, however, are objecting to having the budget balance on their backs.

Can't blame them -- the increase in premium sharing amounts to a decrease in their take-home pay.

But the 100 percent deal was too good to last forever and for both fiscal and policy reasons, it needs to be changed. The move from paying nothing to paying 15 percent, however, seems like too big a change to make at one time.

That's a big adjustment to make in household budgets with so little time to plan. A fairer approach would be to go to the 15 percent over three years, with a guarantee it would stay at that level for some set period of time.


Reader comments

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smalltownvis of Manchester, ME
May 27, 2007 6:48 AM
It seems to me that this whole idea of the current state employees paying anything for their health insurance is an injustice unless the state gives them a pay increase equal to the contribution they will be forced to pay for their health insurance. Most state jobs pay less than the private sector but most people work for the state assuming that the benefit packages and the job they do are much more secure than what the private sector may offer them.

My father worked for the Maine State Police and my mother for Central Maine Power Company. My father retired and received his benefits that had been promised to him. MY MOTHER RETIRED AND LOST SOME OF HER BENEFITS 18 YEARS AFTER SHE RETIRED. She did have long term and nursing home care and now that she is 93 and could use those benefits, she finds out they were taken away in 1999. I guess you could say she outlived her retirement benefits. If you really want to upset yourself take a look at some of the retirement and bonus packages handed out to upper management after 1999 for doing such a wonderful job and saving the company so much money.

I believe this sort of thinking by our legislatures will have a very negative impact on how devoted our state employees are to their jobs. It is difficult enough for many of them to continue to be productive because they have personal integrity and care about the people they serve and it seems to many of them that the bureaucrats they work for and many of our legislatures are making it impossible to be productive.

It just seems that these bureaucrats and legislatures are suggesting that state employees are over compensated so we will take it out of your pay. The same legislators and bureaucrats that feel they are not paid enough and should get an immediate raise plus more benefits probably support this.

Is it possible our Legislatures are ETHICALLY CHALLENGED? That couldn’t be because they already ruled that they do not need a code of ethics, they have ethics.report abuse
Joe Schmoe of Augusta, ME
May 27, 2007 8:40 AM
Typical politicians. Don't try to find a solution to the problem, in this case the outrageous cost of health insurance. Instead find a temporary fix by forcing folks to bend to the whims of the insurance industry and pay more.

I say address the real issue. The raping of America by the insurance industry.report abuse
Sheila Evans of Chelsea, ME
May 27, 2007 8:44 AM
Another modest solution is to give up the pretense that for profit health care will in any way control costs. We can get there the slow way or we can get there the smart way. The slow way is through processes embraced by this editorial, keep shifting costs and pretending that a human right, access to care when ill, is something that has a place in the market driven capitalistic system.

Or we can be smart and do what every other nation that has the means and the intelligence has done, set up a national system that provides access and eliminates the profit piece.

Our national Medicare model is working and can be expanded to a national single payer model - it provides the access to care without thought to profit, it cuts out the administrative costs and it is affordable within the bounds of the national revenue stream if we stop sending billions into the black hole born of lies by the Master of Disaster in Chief.report abuse
Jim Moore of Brunswick, ME
May 27, 2007 9:06 AM
Health insurance, like salary and vacation days, is one of the carrots created to lure people into working for the state.

Having offered the carrot, and succeeded in luring that worker into civil service employment, we are morally barred from taking it away.

There's a phrase for those who do otherwise. It's "bait and switch."

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