Free coverage for lawmakers 'doesn't look right,' some say

By Carol Gentry
4/25/2008 © Florida Health News

Florida’s lawmakers shouldn’t accept free health insurance for themselves and their families while deciding how to cut coverage for others, some health policy analysts and consumer advocates say. “It makes them hypocrites,” said Becky Cherney, director of a business group in Orlando. Tampa consumer activist Bill Newton said the deal “doesn’t look right.”

Cannon

Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., said the free coverage may explain why Florida law is larded with dozens of “mandates,” services that the law requires insurers to cover even if most customers don’t want them. “Because (legislators) don’t have to write a check, they are much less wary of all the special interests who come to the State House and ask for laws that increase the cost of health insurance,” said Cannon.

On Thursday, Florida Health News reported that even though the state has one of the highest rates of uninsured workers and families in the nation, state lawmakers enjoy a remarkably generous health benefit package. Only seven other states pay 100 percent of legislators’ health insurance premiums, according to the National Council of State Legislatures; the group said it didn’t know how many of them besides Florida cover the full freight for families, as well.

All but six of Florida’s 160 lawmakers are receiving the free coverage, and 80 percent of them also enrolled their spouses and children at no charge, according to the Office of Legislative Services. Thirty-one took individual coverage, which costs taxpayers about $5,000 a year. And 123 took family coverage, which costs more than $11,600 a year apiece. The total annual cost to taxpayers of legislators’ coverage is nearly $1.5 million.

Zero-premium insurance also covers almost 24,000 state employees, mostly senior managers, political appointees, legislative staff and employees in the Governor’s Office. Meanwhile, civil service employees have to contribute to the premium cost of their health insurance or forego coverage.

In Tallahassee, there’s little appetite for discussing a topic that could tick off lawmakers just as they’re debating which programs to cut from the budget. Others say it isn’t news, that the perk for lawmakers and top state employees has been a fact of life in Tallahassee for many years, regardless of which party was in control.

Reaction in other parts of Florida was quite different. Even some who are politically active said they didn’t know about the free insurance, including Becky Cherney, president and CEO of the Florida Health Care Coalition, an Orlando-based employer group concerned about quality of care and ever-rising costs.

“Employers have known for a decade that providing free health insurance was a terrible policy,” she said. “It disconnected the insured from the rising cost of health care.” When consumers aren’t aware of costs, they don’t feel responsible for controlling them, she said.

Part-time workers – which lawmakers are, technically -- aren’t usually eligible for state health insurance coverage, Cherney pointed out. Lawmakers should pay the premiums for themselves and their families, she said, and state employees who get a free ride should begin paying their share of premiums at the same rate as other state employees.

Cherney said she hopes the six legislators who “didn’t feed at the trough” will be identified so they can “be recognized for their restraint.”

Over in Tampa, at Florida Consumer Action Network, Executive Director Bill Newton said legislators should be held to the same standards as others. “Shouldn’t they at least contribute toward their premium like most people have to?” he asked.

Several legislators told Florida Health News’ Tallahassee Correspondent Christine Jordan Sexton, who wrote Thursday’s article, that they didn’t see the perk as a conflict. “You don’t have to be poor to appreciate what somebody with no money experiences every day,” said Sen. Jim King, R-Jacksonville. “I don’t think (free health insurance) makes us elitists.”

The perk may not make King elitist, said Newton of Consumer Action, but “it does make him elite. Most of us are not in that category…There’s a difference in viewing (a problem) from a distance and having first-hand experience.”

The criticism likely to sting lawmakers the most comes from Cannon of the Cato Institute, who was one of the featured speakers at a Tallahassee symposium in February held to tell scores of lawmakers -- mostly Republicans – of the merits of market-based health reform. A key tenet of the philosophy is that patients have to have their own finances at stake before they will bring health inflation under control.

Cannon said the free coverage allows legislators to poor-mouth their $32,000 salary when they are actually receiving another $12,000 in health benefits – a total compensation package of $44,000.

“It’s a pretty sneaky way of increasing their own compensation package,” Cannon said.

But in Tallahassee, there’s no appetite for such talk. “All Florida residents have a right to affordable health care,” said Sally House, director of government affairs for Florida Retail Federation. A squabble over benefits for lawmakers and senior state managers “only serves as a distraction from the root of the problem – spiraling health care costs. That’s where lawmakers need to focus their attention.”

--Carol Gentry, Editor, can be reached at Carol.Gentry@FloridaHealthNews.