By Merrill Matthews
Dallas, TX – When Bill Clinton was campaigning for the presidency in 1992, he turned the fact that here were 39 million Americans without health insurance into a national crisis. The whole country began to focus on the health care system and the problem of the uninsured.
Today, we in Texas are hearing once again about the crisis of the uninsured - only this time, it's uninsured teachers. There are 522,000 school employees in the state, and 350 of them work in one of the 17 school districts that do not offer health insurance. They just don't make a crisis like they used to. Nevertheless, the state legislature is giving serious consideration to moving teachers into the health insurance plan for state employees, at an estimated cost of about $3 billion a year. Does this strike anyone besides me as trying to kill a fly with a nuclear weapon? And if teachers are successful, will they like what the get? There seems to be a general assumption among all the proponents of putting teachers under the state employees' health plan that everyone will get better coverage. That's not necessarily true.
Currently, school employees' health coverage comes through the local school district, which means that different school systems have different health plans. Some may get better coverage in a switch; others won't. But workers who have changed jobs recently, and changed health coverage as a result, know that change doesn't always mean for the better. It often means changing doctors because the ones you had been going to are not in the new plan's network. Certain services covered under one plan may not be covered, or covered to the same extent, under the other. Most employees dread these disruptions, yet the teachers seem to be longing for it.
Change will also mean loss of local control. If teachers are dissatisfied with their current coverage, they can go to the local school board or perhaps the city council and express their concern. Under a statewide plan, they would have to go to Austin. If teachers think it's hard to deal with City Hall, wait until they confront the State House. Needed changes won't just affect a few thousand, but hundreds of thousands, many of whom may not want change. Are teachers really that anxious to lose local control of their health plan?
Finally, you have to wonder why both educational and political leaders haven't recognized the most obvious solution to the problem of uninsured teachers. If there are a handful of school districts that are unable to provide health insurance, give those school employees the option of buying into the state employees' health plan. The state could even subsidize their coverage if the districts are too financially strapped to help. That would create a safety net for uninsured teachers and be a whole lot cheaper than the $3 billion now being considered.
The fact is there is no crisis of uninsured teachers. So why disrupt the coverage of hundreds of thousands of families? Create a safety net for those who can't get health insurance and let the teachers and school districts continue with a system that has worked well for years.
Merrill Matthews is a visiting scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, and Policy Director for the American Conservative Network.