In his six years, repeatedly
Obama has implemented policies that create or exacerbate a problem and proceeds
to blame anybody who did not assist him in that problem’s creation for it. He raised
taxes and wildly increased deficit spending to engineer the most simpering
economic recovery on record; he made disability payments and unemployment
compensation easier to get to bring the country’s workforce participation rate
to the lowest in almost 40 years; his health care insurance policies have sent
costs escalating without any positive impact on outcomes. And we have the
Louisiana Legislature acting much the same as it looks to convene a gripe
session over what it did to itself.
This concerns plans of the Office
of Group Benefits to restructure benefits provisions for health insurance.
While some clients will end up paying less overall, in the aggregate insured
persons likely will face increased health
care costs
– even as their rates are about four percent lower than they were two years ago
and their plans provide benefits much in excess of typical policies for rates
significantly below that paid in then individual market and often better than
in the group market as a whole.
Because of that lowering of costs
to ratepayers, this drained the reserve fund, which had carried an artificially
high amount of idle taxpayer dollars, to a more realistic level but that
unless rates were raised – those being pressured
upwards
by the inefficiencies spawned by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
– or benefits altered through more efficient delivery and/or changing their
pricings this trend would drop the fund below recommended actuarial levels. The
Gov. Bobby
Jindal Administration chose the latter option, which is appropriate in that
employees/retirees should pay closer to their fair share for underpriced and
generous benefits to the relief of taxpayers.
Naturally, this has caused
heartburn among legislators, who do their best to avoid hard choices for which
they must take responsibility, hence the calling of a gripe session later this
month about these changes. This is an attempt to deflect the responsibility they
have for these changes, by their approval of the budgets that built in lowering
of the premiums that, in the face of rising costs, not only got the reserve
down to industry levels but also could not keep up with these accelerating
prices. By doing so, they saved $44 million over the two years reductions have
been in effect for use in other areas of the budget because as premiums went
down, so did the state’s generous (usually triple the ratepayer’s premium)
share it needed to pay. For example, while the guy most responsible for getting
the spleen-venting session together as an extension of his gubernatorial campaign,
state Rep. John
Bel Edwards, voted against
this year’s budget, he voted for
last year’s when the premium reductions first came about.
But some legislators have taken
hypocrisy to new heights on this issue, such as state Rep. Joe Harrison
when he asserts that “poor management” has caused this, and this somehow is
connected to privatization of administering benefits. What he means remains a
mystery to the rest of the world. So is he trying to say that the privatization,
which by itself saved millions by getting rid of bloated bureaucracy, combined
with the estimated savings of $114 million by administrative actions already
taken and others implemented for the next plan year is “poor management?”
Of course, Harrison is an expert
on financial mismanagement, as verified by his
now being scrutinized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for billing
taxpayers for campaign and personal expenses. Or perhaps since, according to
his own explanations for charging his campaign so much for travel expenses, he
makes round trips from one end to the other of his district at least once a
day, he spends too much time driving and not enough paying attention to his
legislative duties (and probably stops along the way to commiserate with this
other frequent politician driver), and thereby doesn’t perhaps have the
best handle on what’s going on in state government.
At least another moaner, state
Rep. Cameron
Henry, doesn’t have that kind of baggage. Still, he may benefit from
adhering to the old aphorism, when he complains about how OGB is “fiscally
unsound,” that he who lives in a glass house better not throw stones. If he
believes what he says, then he has had a hand in promoting that by his approval
of the 2013 budget, and the guy he ought to be criticizing looks back at him in
the mirror. And certainly none of him, Harrison, nor Edwards, indeed no
legislator, ever spoke against cutting premiums in any public forum.
But you get the picture: it’s all
about politics. It’s the same
attitude a number of legislators have on fiscal issues in general. So keep
in mind when criticism of this nature gets eagerly hurled about on Sep. 25 that
it’s only typical behavior of these squeaky wheels who, by the creation by
their own hands of what they consider problems they then criticize, demonstrate
they’re more interested getting the grease of headlines to puff up their electoral
images than in any real commitment to making good policy concerning this issue.
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