Mayors and town administrators have spoken with near unanimity in favor of "plan design" — a change in the law that would give cities and towns the same authority as the state to determine the kind of health plans offered their employees.
Yet despite the potential savings — hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, per community per year — legislators simply can't summon the courage to move the proposal forward.
Rep. Paul Donato, D-Medford, House chairman of the legislative Committee on Municipalities and Regional Government, deemed it "too controversial" to include in the "Municipal Relief Act" his panel was scheduled to release Tuesday.
Sadly, it appears Donato and his colleagues are still more beholden to the municipal unions than they are to those who elect them.
As Geoffrey Beckwith, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, told the Statehouse News Service this week, "Plan design's an issue that benefits the taxpayers of the state and guarantees municipal employees still very good health insurance."
Better than most, we suspect. But while unions would still be able to negotiate the share of health premiums their members must pay, plan design would allow municipal officials to unilaterally determine just what kind of plan or plans — including the amount of co-pays and deductibles — would be offered.
No question it's a big change, and one can't fault the unions for defending the comfortable status quo. But legislators are supposed to be looking out for the best interest of all their constituents, not just those who happen to work in the public sector.
Voters have made it clear that they are unwilling to pay more taxes to sustain a benefit structure in the public sector that is far more generous than can be found, with few exceptions, in private industry.
As painful as it may be to contemplate, legislators are going to have to modify even some of those benefits won through the collective-bargaining process in order to get things back on an even keel. For so long as a majority of taxpayers believe that any extra money taken from their pockets will simply go into someone else's, our cities and towns are going to find themselves lurching from one fiscal crisis to the next.
