Reforming health insurance law will keep great educators in our kids’ schools
By Chandra Madafferi, Michigan Education Association President and CEO
Just weeks ago, many of our kids’ best and brightest educators were heading toward a financial crisis — but thanks to advocacy by the Michigan Education Association and other unions, state lawmakers have averted a crisis that would have left many students without trained, qualified professionals leading their classrooms.
Under Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s bipartisan leadership, our state has made a lot of progress in addressing the educator shortage affecting schools and students across Michigan. Whitmer and the Legislature have passed record preK-12 budgets, invested heavily in student mental health and school safety, addressed funding inequities in rural and urban schools, and launched groundbreaking programs designed to increase the number of talented young people choosing to become teachers.
However, many of these gains would have been wiped out without the Legislature’s recent passage of House Bill 6058, which fixes a law that placed an artificially low cap on what school districts and other public employers can pay toward their employees’ health care.
Despite all of the positive developments over the past several years, Michigan’s public school employees — like most working families — continue to struggle with the rising cost of health care. As challenging as these rising costs have been for everyone, they have been unfairly made much worse for teachers, support staff and other public workers.
That’s because, in 2011, state lawmakers passed Public Act 152, which placed a cap on how much school districts can spend on employees’ health coverage. That capped amount has not kept up with inflation, leading to school employees paying an ever-increasing share of their districts’ total health insurance costs. This has profoundly impacted educators’ lives, resulting in hundreds of dollars more taken out of every paycheck, making it harder to care for themselves and their families.
The 2011 law led many great educators to leave the profession they love for jobs in the private sector with better pay and benefits. In turn, that has meant fewer qualified educators to help prepare our kids for the future — and unfortunately, this has reached a tipping point.
School employees’ health insurance rates are set to increase by double-digit percentages in 2025, yet the state-mandated hard cap for what school districts can pay rose by only 0.2%. As a result, school employees would pay all but a tiny sliver of the total increases, amounting to several thousand dollars a year in pay cuts to maintain health coverage.
Any hard-earned raises our kids’ teachers and school support staff might have received this past year would have been offset (and then some) by even more money taken out of their paychecks for health insurance. This might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, resulting in our most qualified educators fleeing the education field.
MEA and our labor partners worked closely with lawmakers, school superintendents and other officials to identify and advocate for a fix to this impending crisis, and we’re finally near the finish line.
HB 6058, which now sits on the governor’s desk, will immediately increase the 2025 cap by 7%, set a minimum percentage for future cap increases, and provide school districts and educators more flexibility when bargaining health benefits.
Our students deserve great educators in every school, and we can only achieve this by allowing school districts to offer competitive wages and benefits that can keep good employees and attract more talent to the education profession.
On behalf of about 120,000 educators in all corners of the state, MEA encourages the governor to sign HB 6058 and keep great teachers and support staff working in our kids’ schools.
Labor Voices
Labor Voices columns are written on a rotating basis by United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, Michigan Education Association President Chandra Madafferi, Michigan Regional Council of Carpenters and Millwrights Executive Secretary-Treasurer Tom Lutz and selected Service Employees International Union members.
