Vetoed again

Our locally-endorsed, Education Minnesota-sponsored Statewide Health Insurance for School Employees bill was vetoed again. The excuses were even weaker this year than the last.

Consider that Education Minnesota took last year's veto letter and spent the entire year addressing his concerns line by line. Several discussions with the Governor's office took place. Phone calls and conversations with the Commerce Department were made. The plan was redesigned to match the solutions to the Governor's concerns in every instance.

Our state union Education Minnesota negotiated in good faith.

Our state union worked repeatedly throughout the session to try to schedule conversations with the Governor and his staff to check in on our progress to address his concerns.

And he has the nerve to say "the structure of the pool was changed late in the session" as if that is our fault?!

Our own St. Paul School District was quoted in a newspaper as stating the cost of our health insurance in St. Paul increased by $21 million in a 4 year time span. An increase. That's not even the budget. That's just the increase.

And he has the nerve to say "It does not make sense for the state to mandate that school districts obtain health insurance from a health insurance pool if participating school districts do not achieve significant savings," as if significant savings hasn't been the point of this bill since its inception?!

He boasted at the beginning of the session that he was going to be happy to get a lot of use out of his "taxpayer protection pen" but Tim Pawlenty is clearly wrong here.

Larger pools save money. They mitigate the effects of unforeseen catastrophic care. They spread the risk. They do everything a good insurance pool should do.

Tim Pawlenty has left taxpayers in every school district extremely vulnerable with this veto.