State workers would pay to help close $515 million gap

State Rep. Bill Cook, R-Beaufort, apparently preparing to feel some heat from state employees, offered a defense of this week’s House vote approving changes to the state’s health insurance plan for state workers.

The plan is facing a $515 million shortfall, according The Associated Press, and the bill OK’d by the House would pass more costs on to state workers.

“That means if we didn’t do anything state workers of all kinds would be going to doctors, and the doctors would be saying, ‘Forget it, your insurance isn’t paying,’” Cook said of the shortfall. “So, we had to fix it. We had to fix it or folks wouldn’t have any health insurance.”

Cook added it’s the shortfall that led House Republicans to push for changes in the health plan, including a move to charge premiums to state workers, and put the plan in the hands of the state treasurer.

State workers who get health-care coverage under the plan still would have the option of getting that coverage for free, but their benefits would be reduced, Cook pointed out.

“If we hadn’t made these changes, there just wouldn’t have been any money to pay health care’s price,” he commented.

North Carolina has what is called a “self-insured group,” meaning the state keeps a pot of money to pay health insurance claims and hires an outside entity to manage the system, Cook explained.

For years, the system basically has been run by the Democratic-majority Legislature, he said.

“They are the folks who would make the decisions, policy decisions, and design the rate structure and just do all that mess, which I think is just crazy because you end up with a bunch of politicians trying to decide each year how to manage the health care system,” Cook said.

Speaking of Democrats, he asserted, “They made the mess.”

Asked to respond to allegations that the recent GOP-led vote amounted to an attack on public workers, Cook replied by saying Democrats were in charge for many years and hadn’t accepted responsibility for the plan’s difficulties.

“It just boggles my mind,” he said. “The audacity, the unmitigated temerity. It’s just incredible. It’s like if I came to your house and threw up on your floor and I said, ‘No, I didn’t do that.’”

Adam Searing disagreed with Cook’s assessment of the health plan issue.

Searing is director of the Health Access Coalition, a project of the North Carolina Justice Center, a left-leaning advocacy group in Raleigh.

“I feel like that we are taking away a benefit that is going to mean a lot to a lot of people who we really depend on,” Searing said.

Under the bill to which Cook referred, state workers covered under North Carolina’s plan will have maximum annual out-of-pocket costs of $3,210, a $70 co-pay to see a specialist and an added $700 deductible, Searing related.

“What the state plan is becoming is essentially a catastrophic health plan,” he said, adding, “Is that how we want to treat our teachers and our police officers? I think that’s disappointing.”

Republicans in the Legislature “have put any talk of raising revenue off the table,” Searing argued.

“Any sort of big cut like this, if you’re not going to talk about, for instance, keeping the current 1-cent sales tax for another year, which would easily eliminate the need to make this cut to the state health plan, you’re not really portraying all sides of the discussion,” he said.

For his part, Cook said voting for the bill gave him no pleasure, though he’s convinced it was the right move.

“We did the right thing,” he said.