So I was in a meeting yesterday with Rob McKenna, AG and candidate for Gov in the state of WA. He said right now the State of Washington pays about $3B / year for medical coverage for state employees; this is about 10% of the total state budget. The cost is rising at about 10% / year, so in 7 years the cost will double.
This is of course unsustainable; you cannot have the state budget held hostage to cover the entire medical costs for a small part of the people. There are about 6.8M people in Washington State and about 100,000 full time and 54,000 part time state employees (122,000 FTEs).
http://www2.census.gov/govs/apes/10stwa.txt
This implies we (the tax payers) pay about $25,000 / year toward each state employee’s (and dependents) healthcare coverage.
So 1.8% of the population (in WA State) gets gold plated coverage and everyone else gets ObamaCare.
It just cannot be, how did this happen? Unless we get healthcare costs under control, insist state employees pay some portion of their premium/costs and insist on some free market reforms, all else is moot. Other federal medical insurance premiums are set to ruin us all, and time is quickly running out.
McKenna was quite impressive I would say, he really knew the issues.
schu
“So 1.8% of the population (in WA State) gets gold plated coverage and everyone else gets ObamaCare.”
But not for long!! And we thought things here in California were bad! In reality, this is probably the same metric you will find in most of the states. It is unsustainable as you pointed out. The states will go bankrupt irrespective of what the Constitution says. When the money is gone, it’s gone!