In 2003, legislative leaders had to plow tens of thousands of dollars into their budgets when more than a dozen older lawmakers retired the year before and, understandably, opted for the state to pay their health care premiums for the Public Employee Health Plan, the quasi-public plan that is part of the Utah Retirement System.

A Utah legislator qualifies for the retirement health care benefit in two ways:

• He stays in office up to the age of retirement and has four or more years in office.

• He leaves office before he is 62 but continues to pay the full cost for PEHP-offered health care insurance out of his own pocket.

The cost for an out-of-office, non-retired legislator is steep, between $849 and $789.50 a month for a family's coverage, said Linn Baker, head of PEHP.

"But you get a great health care plan, and it may be worth it" for a former legislator who is approaching retirement age, or for some medical reason is unable to get health insurance in the private sector, Baker adds.

If a former legislator with 10 years in office is on PEHP at the time of his retirement, then the state starts picking up the health care premiums for the rest of the lives of the former legislator and his/her spouse.

The state provides its workers, including part-time lawmakers, with a good health care plan, heavily subsidized by state tax dollars.

The high-end plan costs state workers just $713.18 a year, the cheapest just $189.54 a year, Baker said. The state's costs for those plans are, respectively, $10,188 and $9,474 annually.

Of the current 104 legislators, all but eight have signed up for one of the state's health care plans. And two of those eight have spouses who already had PEHP coverage through their public-sector jobs, so the legislator was covered by the state's plan before taking office.

If those 98 current legislators all retired while in office — a big "if" because most won't be in office when they reach 62 — it would cost the state about a half million dollars a year in health insurance premiums for those retirees. If insurance costs continue to escalate, Utah taxpayers will pay even more over the length of the retirees' benefits.

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E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com