DN Editorial: Lawmakers' health coverage will make you ill

YOU'D BETTER be sitting down for this:

As the state Legislature busies itself cutting off health-care coverage for 42,000 low-income workers, and trying to blockade federal efforts to reform health care, its members are enjoying gold-plated health coverage themselves, for which they pay a pittance.

Members of the state Senate pay 1 percent of their salaries toward their expensive health benefits. Soon, House members will do the same, although until then, we are picking up the annual tab: $15,000 per member.

State workers have it pretty good, too, though they are paid far less than our $78,000-a-year lawmakers: they pay 3 percent of their salaries to offset the $10,000-plus their health care costs us.

How do these benefits stack up against what we regular working folks in private industry pay? This is the part that is going to make you ill: The average Pennsylvania worker is paying about 10 percent of his or her salary toward health care.

And the only thing we have to look forward to is that next year, that will probably be even higher.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has reams of data and reports on health- care costs, the average American worker contributes 30 percent of his total health-care premiums (for family coverage; the number for single coverage is 19 percent). Based on the average wages of state workers - $49,000 - they end up contributing about 14 percent of the costs of their coverage.

State senators and their staffs contribute 5 percent of the costs- about $780 a year, an amount that barely qualifies as walking-around money. Until July, state representatives pay zero percent.

Under any circumstances, this disparity would be scandalous. But consider the current landscape of health care:

* The costs of health care are rising, and employers pass those hikes onto workers, with higher contributions, higher deductibles, and higher co-pays and prescription costs. (It will come as no surprise that state lawmakers enjoy low deductibles, tiny co-pays and negligible prescription costs.)

* Health-premium costs for family coverage are

now $13,770 a year, about double what it was 10 years ago.

* Average salaries are not only

not growing, but many are shrinking.

* High unemployment is increasingly raising the number of uninsured.

Yet state lawmakers are now cutting off adultBasic coverage to the thousands of working poor in the state, and suing the federal government on its health-carereform efforts. It's ironic that state lawmakers who are opposed to government involvement in people's health coverage have no problem with people paying top dollar for government's coverage.

They're so coddled with privileges - the cars, the per diems, the big salaries - that they have little understanding of just how privileged they are. It makes their current actions downright cruel.

Although Gov. Corbett is no longer attorney general, he should attack this scandal head-on. So far, he's addressed this only by politely requesting lawmakers to increase their health-care contributions. He - and the rest of us - should make this the next "Bonusgate."

The haves and have-nots will always be with us, but increasingly the "haves" are the lawmakers, and the "have-nots" are the rest of us. *