Gov. Deval Patrick's latest proposal to cut health insurance costs for cities and towns is vastly better than the faux "tool" he gave to municipalities during his first term.
The governor, it seems, has finally grasped the reality that is obvious to everybody else: Giving public employee unions veto power over reform efforts means there won't be any reform.
Still, the plan he announced last week before the Massachusetts Municipal Association could have, and should have, been better. It still requires collective bargaining. That will be time-consuming, expensive and, ultimately, will dilute the kinds of savings necessary to confront ever-widening local budget gaps, especially at a time when, year after year, local aid is being cut.
The cut in non-school local aid for the coming year is $65 million, or about 7 percent.
In the governor's defense, he does have to deal with another reality: legislative leaders whose political base is the unions. He can propose anything, but if it doesn't get through the Legislature, nothing gets accomplished.
This proposal reportedly has the support of at least House Speaker Robert DeLeo, who said earlier this month that if the unions don't agree to savings that would be equal to those of joining the state health plan, called the Group Insurance Commission, they should be forced to join it.
That will give municipalities the kind of leverage they have never had before. The previous Patrick policy had been that cities and towns could join the GIC, but only if 70 percent of the local unions agreed. That, predictably, went almost nowhere. In the past four years, only about two dozen of 351 municipalities could get their unions to agree. During the past year, not a single new community agreed to join the GIC in 2012.
Still, there are good reasons to remove the matter from collective bargaining altogether. The state already has the authority to impose so-called "plan design," or to set the terms of health insurance outside of collective bargaining. Protests by unions that this will somehow undermine collective bargaining are not borne out by the reality that the GIC plan is still superior to most of those in the private sector.
Why shouldn't local officials have the same authority?
As MMA executive director Geoffrey Beckwith noted, "We believe the best way to achieve meaningful savings swiftly is by giving communities the ability to make plan design changes outside of collective bargaining."
Municipal officials could recover more than what they will lose in local aid if they are given the power to do so.
The governor and Legislature should grant them that power. It is long overdue.
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