From Deseret News archives:
Cut lawmakers' benefit?
Axing his colleagues' health-care aid is only fair, legislator says
Rep. Dave Clark, R-Santa Clara, says tightening up lawmakers' own health-care retirement benefits is only fair, considering what the Legislature had to do to state workers in the 2005 general session. He'll introduce a bill in the 2006 Legislature to do away with health-care retirement benefits for legislators and governors.
"Sounds like this is Dave Clark's own (legislative) term limits bill," said Senate Minority Leader Mike Dmitrich, D-Price.
At 68, Dmitrich said, "I'd seriously have to consider retiring" from the Legislature in order to continue getting health-care benefits in the future.
Clark's HB213, passed last session, changed the formula by which soon-to-retire state employees can convert their unused sick leave into post-retirement health-care premiums paid for by the state.
State retirement board officials say HB213 could cut from 10 years to two years the time in which a longtime employee's health-care premiums would be paid for by the state — the employee having to pay those premiums after his or her sick leave conversion time runs out.
In 1998 the Legislature voted to pay the health-care premiums for retired legislators for the lifetime of the legislator and for the lifetime of his or her spouse. Any minor children of a retired legislator are covered until they reach 18. So that current legislative benefit is even more generous than what had been provided to state employees.
For fiscal year 2004-05, the state paid for 28 retired legislative health-care plans costing $120,231, the Deseret Morning News reported this spring.
The state had to cut future state employee health-care benefits, HB213 supporters said, because rising health-care costs could mean the state would have to pick up more than half a billion dollars in future retirees' health-care benefits, an amount that would "break the taxpayer bank."
HB213 gave state employees a year grace period under the old retirement formula, and it appears that a number of veteran state workers will be retiring — many of them taking early retirement — before January 2006.
Clark says his bill, should it pass, will give the same one-year grace period to legislators — they can leave before January 2007 and get health insurance for life for themselves and their spouses.
"That would be a big financial hit" to have to pick up his own health insurance payments when he finally leaves office, said Dmitrich, who was first elected to the part-time Legislature in 1968.
