On Tuesday, I wrote the following in a blog about the details of the universal health care plan approved in the state budget by Senate Democrats:
The deeper you dig into the plan, the more questions you find. At my request the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB) prepared an analysis of the plan. Here are some of the troubling aspects I found under the category of who is eligible.
The LFB writes this about teachers, with the key phrase in bold:
Municipal Employment Relations Law. Provide that the definition of economic issue would include "health insurance coverage of benefits not provided under the Healthy Wisconsin Plan."
Under current law, the definition includes the term "health insurance." Further, provide that, for the purpose of determining if a school district employer has maintained current fringe benefits requirements under current qualified economic offer (QEO) law, the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) would be required to consider the employer to have maintained its health care coverage benefit if the employer provides health care coverage to its school district professional employees through the Healthy Wisconsin Plan and supplements that coverage, if necessary, to produce a health care coverage benefit that is actuarially equivalent to the health care coverage benefit in place before the school district professional employees become covered under the Healthy Wisconsin Plan.
Provide that, if a dispute arises concerning the employer’s determination of actuarial equivalence or what supplemental benefits are sufficient to achieve actuarial equivalence, the dispute must be resolved by a neutral person who is designated by WERC.In other words, teachers are guaranteed to retain their current coverage. The rest of us will take the plan dictated by the government health authority.
Today, The Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel picked up on the teacher angle of the universal health care plan and quoted me.
Here is the
Journal/Sentinel article.
