Teacher tells lawmakers to reject House Bill 5345

Moving testimony highlights need for local control of health insurance

MEA member, Lori Spotts, testifies at hearing Lori Spotts always considered herself an active person, living a healthy lifestyle.

Other than minor sports-related injuries over the years and preventive check-ups, the veteran teacher and coach rarely needed to use her health care.

Everything changed Dec. 22, 2008. That was the day a routine mammogram revealed a very aggressive form of breast cancer.

Ten months later, Spotts was sitting in the ornate House Appropriations Committee room at the state Capitol, testifying about House Bill 5345, a proposal to force all public employees into a state-run health plan.

“I have read House Bill 5345,” she told lawmakers. “And, honestly and quite frankly, it scares the hell out of me.”

Spotts, a teacher and union leader in Tecumseh,  is one of several thousand MEA members and leaders who contacted their legislators this fall about the proposed law, introduced by House Speaker Andy Dillon, D-Redford Township. A special House panel, the Public Employee Health Care Reform Committee, held several public hearings in Lansing, including an Oct. 29 meeting that Spotts attended with her MEA UniServ Director, Jim Berryman.

Spotts offered perhaps the most moving personal commentary before the committee to date, describing the fear and physical and emotional turmoil one faces during a life-altering disease or illness.

“It is a life-changing experience that is difficult to comprehend unless one has been there,” Spotts said. “I am not certain what the future holds for me, but the health care I may have once taken for granted is the health care that was there for me when I needed it most.”

After her diagnosis, Spotts had months of tests and procedures, including mammograms, MRI tests, bone scans, CT scans, biopsies, echocardiograms, x-rays, surgery, reconstructive surgery, 13 rounds of chemotherapy, and 35 radiation treatments.

The treatment plan, Spotts said, was carefully and professionally decided with her physician.

“There was no place in that room for government – no place for government to dictate what my options may or may not be,” Spotts said. “House Bill 5345 puts government in that room.”

Further, Spotts said, the scheme takes away the very tool that public employees and public employers have to control health care costs at the local level – collective bargaining.

Spotts is a veteran bargainer; she’s been on her association bargaining team for 15 years. She currently serves as president of the Tecumseh Education Association.

During her testimony, Spotts said that the local association hasn’t been able to settle a new contract with the district because state funding is so uncertain. Part of the teachers’ proposal will help keep health care costs down – Spotts told lawmakers that their health care proposal would have the district paying less per member per month than it paid in 2005.

Such a move is possible because Tecumseh teachers have negotiated different health care plans, deductibles, then higher deductibles, higher prescription drug cards, and teachers pay a portion of their monthly insurance premiums. And, teachers have given up wage increases to maintain health care.

“Maintaining our right to bargain health care has enabled us to do for ourselves what House Bill 5345 would like to mandate,” Spotts said. “The difference is that we are negotiating our benefits and the cost to each of our members. We are not having those benefits dictated to us by a panel of appointees of state government.”

Updated: November 3, 2009