The state Legislature convened in special session from Thursday afternoon until shortly after midnight on Saturday morning.
That way it could say it met for the legally mandated three-day minimum even though its actual working time was best measured in minutes.
What the Legislature did was pump $43 million of your tax payments—which conservative legislators profess to want to cut while spending madly for local projects and other conveniences—into the state public school teachers’ self-insurance health plan.
That means participating teachers will pay premium increases next year of about 10 percent instead of about 50 percent.
What happened was that the teachers’ self-insured health plan was chronically generous in benefits but less so in employer and employee contributions. The situation got precipitously worse when, owing to premium increases, teachers and other school employees switched to cheaper offerings within the plan. In some cases, though, they were still running up similar costs for medical attention. In the insurance business, that’s called a death spiral.
The Legislature also remade the board overseeing the teacher plan, since it decided to blame the board.
It passed another bill setting up a task force to recommend reforms to keep this shortfall from happening again. For a time, those reforms had been widely insisted upon as prerequisites for the bailout.
But it turned out that reform couldn’t happen immediately because contracts were too far along for the imminently re-upped health plans. So legislators passed rigorous wording requiring them, by George, to come up with some reforms at a later date.
The outline of those reforms is very simple: Plans must become less generous. They must cost teachers more, both in premiums and cost-sharing. And state government and local school districts must ante up more.
All of that is easier typed than done, as two previous modern-era task forces on the matter could attest.
The politics of the wham-bam session were simple: Whether conservative or less conservative—which covers the philosophical waterfront in the Legislature—it is good politics to keep underpaid school teachers from beating you up for not doing anything to help them on prohibitive health-insurance cost increases.
Some local constituents resent the whole thing, believing that no one is bailing them out and that Obamacare is going to cost them as much.
But it’s not. Generally speaking—and individual cases vary widely—health-insurance rates are expected to rise on average, considering company plans and other group plans and individual plans and government plans, by about the same 10 percent to which teachers will now be held. And there will be government subsidies on Obamacare.
As it happened, the session included a sidebar issue of interest.
It pitted one of Gov. Mike Beebe’s obsessions, which is state-directed fiscal equity in school funding, with one of our state’s cultural obsessions, which is artificial sustaining of cost-ineffective small rural school districts.
A very long story made as short as I can make it: The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled years ago in the epic Lake View case that state government was responsible for equal and adequate educational opportunities for all students.
So the Legislature, led at the time by a Sen. Mike Beebe, cooked up a solution. Among other things, it referred a constitutional amendment that all school districts had to charge at least 25 mills in local property taxes and that those 25-mill proceeds would get pooled at the state level for equal per-pupil distribution statewide.
Then it turned out that a few odd school districts had an inordinate ratio of local property-tax generation to actual student population.
Eureka Springs, for example, has a lot of property but not so many school kids. A small rural district in Garland County includes Hot Springs Village. A small district in Southwest Arkansas has the coal-fired power plant.
Not many kids, but loads of tax collections, you see.
We’re not talking about large, rich and populous districts like those in Pulaski or Washington and Benton Counties.
In these few small districts, the 25 mills produces more per-pupil money locally than the equalized state per-pupil payment. So in those cases the state simply presumed to take the overage for the statewide distribution.
Someone brought suit. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled by 4-3 that no authority existed for the state to usurp locally generated property taxes—though the 25-mill levy did that already—and said this overage should be kept by the little local districts.
This is just like those old “phantom students” that small districts once scandalously got credit for to keep them propped up artificially.
Beebe came mildly unglued over the court ruling, which he thought wholly wrongheaded. So he insisted on putting a presumed fix in the special session, though it was not germane to the teacher matter.
But legislators representing the affected small schools balked. And right-wing legislators don’t like centralized redistribution.
The governor’s proposal got locked up one vote short of passage in the House Education Committee.
So phantom students will continue going to class and soaking up money in eight or so small school districts. And their teachers can now better afford to get sick.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.