Commentary –

State Controls Costs When It Wants To

By Chris Powell

Inflation is inevitably higher in government than in private enterprise because of government’s greater responsibilities for medical care, a reporter who writes about Connecticut government asserted the other day, dismissing a complaint about state government’s propensity to spend. But lately there have been a few hints contradicting that claim of inevitability:

The Rowland administration refused to capitulate to a strike by unionized workers at private nursing homes serving state-supported patients. As a result, the union settled for wage increases substantially less than what it was demanding, and its members will continue to earn substantially less than what state employees in similar jobs are paid.

By contrast, the contract for members of the same union who work for the state’s health, mental health, and welfare departments was sent by law to arbitration, which awarded the workers not only larger raises than those accepted by the private nursing home workers but also a new double-time wage for involuntary overtime. While time-and-a-half will remain the wage for voluntary overtime, the double-time provision creates a huge incentive for workers to refuse to work overtime voluntarily so they can win the higher overtime rate.

While the state budget remains under negotiation between the Republican state administration and the Democratic-controlled General Assembly, a consensus has developed that the state subsidy for prescription drugs for the elderly should be greatly increased so as to cover more elderly people who are not poor. But the same consensus holds that the state’s subsidy for health insurance for children who have none – the “Husky” program – should not be extended to families with higher incomes.

While many of the elderly still have to pay for prescription drugs, at least they have medical insurance through the federal government’s Medicare program. Tens of thousands of children in Connecticut don’t have medical insurance at all, much less state-subsidized prescription drugs.

Why the different treatment among health care workers and among the medical subsidy programs? _State employees and the elderly are established political forces. But the nursing home workers are still working on becoming so, while the uninsured kids aren’t even close and probably never will be. _No inevitability of nature is operating on the state’s public health costs here. This is all ordinary politics. Acting out of politics, state government simply chooses to control some costs and not others. _(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)