Brainstorming sessions, by definition, come up with all kinds of ideas, ranging from good to beyond the pale. The State Health Plan’s Board of Trustees imagined ways to limit or ameliorate costs, to be voted on Feb. 5 and passed on to the state treasurer for approval by the legislature. Most of their proposals suggested familiar cost-cutting tactics in the management of health care plans.
However, one measure proposed was and continues to be unconscionable. The board also proposed the removal of the option of spousal coverage from the plan. Currently, state employees and teachers have the option once a year (or due to a qualifying event) to enroll their spouses in the State Health Plan for employees and teachers. Enrolling one’s spouse is not free; in fact, it costs the employee’s family around $600 a month depending on the plan. Thankfully, the State Treasurer’s Office stated that this proposal would not be considered, and on Feb. 5 this idiotic, cynical idea was tabled, at least for now.
The reasons this proposal deserves the scorn this paper now heaps upon it are several. First, the elimination of spousal coverage was considered almost certainly because the trustees imagined the Affordable Care Act federal exchange providing a backstop once spouses were kicked off the plan. If the Republicans hate the ACA as much as they profess and want to insulate the state against it, then this is definitional hypocrisy. Turfing our own state workers’ loved ones out into the federal marketplace and diluting the power of a large health customer group and its leverage power over pricing are both in contradiction with the states’ rights and free market arguments Republican lawmakers so readily trot out when manning the battlements in their holy war against the ACA. This is a logical contradiction.
The second set of reasons is ethical and practical. Ask a question of yourselves as residents, temporary or permanent, of this state. What kind of people do you want working for you? What do they deserve? The low order of state employee and teacher pay in North Carolina is now a familiar and melancholy song that need not be resung here. However, health benefits for families have long been attractive for well qualified state workers, and rightly so.
While public service is rarely fiscally lucrative, it is relatively stable, and the benefits in particular offer security for one’s family if not unlimited riches. Even proposing to degrade the ability to take care of one’s family in the primal area of health, on top of low comparative pay, is the moral equivalent to the board kicking state workers in the face while the General Assembly already steps on their necks. And in the wake of this kind of treatment, even its risk of proposal, how long do you think good people are going to want to serve you and your state?
The State Health Plan Board of Trustees, and anyone else that finds this an acceptable proposal to limit state budgetary costs, should be ashamed of themselves. For now, it seems that the Board of Trustees, the Treasurer’s Office and the General Assembly, in reconsidering the logical, ethical and practical parameters of a proposal to eliminate spousal coverage, put this shameful brainstorm result in a box. We ask that it never be spoken of again, but we fear that it will come back out of that box all too soon.
