Richard Abernathy, head of the school administrators lobby, says it won’t oppose the school insurance bill in next week’s special session because it would be “fruitless.” Talk Business and Politics reports:
Our strategy is to just watch and monitor the session to make sure other bills are not drafted and run through committees,” Dr. Richard Abernathy with the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators wrote in an email. “These bills have been agreed upon and will pass. That is the problem with a special session … offers no transparency in the process so a few make the decision.”
The “solution” to preventing another catastrophic insurance rate increase for school employees is:
* Dropping part-time employees.
* Requiring working spouses to get insured at their places of employment if they can.
* Take money from schools to cover some of the cost.
They will still have much higher rates than state employees, whose plan covers part-timers and spouses and gets a much larger contribution in state dollars. I notice Sen. Jim Hendren, who wants to force poor school worker onto the Obamacare program he hopes to kill, claims there are only a few hundred part-timers in the state employee plan, so no big deal. I wonder if he counts state legislators in that number, who get solid-gold, richly subsidized state insurance courtesy of taxpayers while school employees are hit with unaffordable rates?
Plain truth from Abernathy:
“Overall, if we want to see the plan be sustainable, we must have additional state dollars (not diverting money from schools),” Abernathy wrote. “I don’t believe we will see any influx in state money to the plan. We must also have additional people on the plan, especially those young healthy employees!!”
Smoke and mirrors won’t “fix” anything.