A plan only Dems and unions could love

The Minnesota State Senate today passed a bill that would align all of Minnesota’s public school districts – representing over 200,000 employees statewide – into a single “insurance pool” that would put the state in control of every teacher’s health insurance options.

It’s a plan pushed by Democrats and teachers union reps, and a plan only lobbyists for big insurers could love. What this does, in essence, is take the small-town insurance broker out of the picture in bidding for the insurance contract of local school districts. Instead, all that money will be siphoned out of local insurance reps and be redistributed to a handful of super-brokers with the right ties in Saint Paul.

Of course, don’t count on the liberal media to tell you that side of the story; the Twin Cities papers are all making it sound like a great idea that will save everyone money, especially smaller school districts like the one I went to as a kid in southern Minnesota. In small districts like that, there are brokers whose livelihood depends on bidding on and winning school district insurance contracts each year, and once this legislation takes effect, that revenue will be grabbed away for good.

Don’t let the libs tell you they’re in favor of small business; this latest bill is about to put a lot of small business insurance agents on the verge of failure, once it all takes effect on 2009. Sure, the legislation is cumbersome and hard to understand, and you might need some financial consolidation software to even get a grasp on what it all means, but the bottom line is that the savings for school districts will come at the cost of the livelihoods of many insurance agents, who will soon be cut out of the bidding process entirely. Call it the Local Insurance Agent Unemployment Act of 2007!