By Chris Powell
Governor Malloy never said he planned to put unionized state employees into the proposed state government-sponsored medical insurance system called “SustiNet.” To the contrary, the governor was the one who derailed the proposal in this year’s session of the General Assembly.
The only person in authority who has claimed that state employees would be put into “SustiNet” is a state employee union leader himself, Sal Luciano, executive director of AFSCME Council 4, who also serves as a member of the board that proposed the “SustiNet” system. Advocating the “SustiNet” legislation in a letter to the governor in April, Luciano wrote, “The state employee health plan will become part of SustiNet.” Luciano seems to have declined to ask his own union constituents how they felt about that.
As it turned out, fear among state employees that “SustiNet” might reduce their medical insurance benefits was a major cause of the union coalition’s rejection of the contract union leaders negotiated with the Malloy administration, a contract whose supposed concessions were no more than a matter of slowing the growth of state employee compensation, not reducing it. So now, to clarify things for a second vote by the unions, the governor, at their behest, has put in writing that state employees will not become part of “SustiNet,” and the unions have repealed the provision of their bylaws requiring a new contract to win a supermajority vote. Perhaps in a month or so Connecticut will regain their permission to have a state government again.
Thus this tedious affair has established not only what is generally understood — that the unions are spoiled and oblivious to the depression swamping Connecticut — but also that people who offer supposedly liberal policy prescriptions in the name of the greater good are not always ready to accept those prescriptions themselves.
That is, many state employees are very attached to the medical insurance provided to them by state government under their contract. Most people outside state government consider that insurance gold-plated. Many state employees also apparently figure that any government insurance system for the masses, and particularly a system meant to coerce society into a government “single-payer” system, will surely not be gold-plated. That is, “SustiNet,” if ever enacted, could be the mechanism by which Connecticut political leaders, including AFSCME’s Luciano, an influential Democrat, limit the medical care available to common people and shift and conceal costs just as Medicare and Medicaid do, causing serious delays and declines in treatment. State employees would only lose that way.
Of course in a true democracy what is good enough for the common people should be good enough for their employees. But even when Connecticut becomes a liberal utopia, some people may still be more equal than others.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
