If Government Works, It Must Be Destroyed

That's the Republican way.  Take for example Louisiana, Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, and the state agency that manages the insurance benefits of a quarter-million state employees and their families, the Louisiana Office of Group Benefits.

Given Republican theory on government anything, you would expect the OGB to be bleeding cash and costing Louisiana taxpayers huge amounts of red ink.  But it's not.  The office is an unqualified success.  It's so successful at managing state employees insurance needs that it's managed to gather a half a billion dollars in surplus.

And it is for this reason that Louisiana Republicans are sworn to destroy the agency.

With his state facing a $1.6 billion budget hole, Governor Bobby Jindal is pushing to privatize the agency that manages Louisiana state employees' health insurance, even though -- or perhaps, because -- it's managed to amass a half billion dollar surplus. The Jindal administration is keeping quiet on the move, while critics are blasting it as a shortsighted plan that will benefit private interests, at the expense of the state's.

Last week, just as questions about Jindal's push to privatize the state's Office of Group Benefits (OGB) were getting louder, the agency's chief executive officer, Tommy Teague, was dismissed. This despite the fact that the agency had racked up most of its sizeable reserves during Teague's tenure at the top.

The OGB, a state agency within the Office of the Governor's Division of Administration (DoA), provides health insurance, accidental benefits and life insurance to nearly 150,000 active and retired state employees and more than 100,000 of their dependents. But the bulk of the agency's work is the health insurance.

It's simple.  Jindal wants to raid the surplus, and then turn the system over to more expensive private insurers so that the quarter million state employees and their families profit insurance companies instead.  Both are currently against the law.  Jindal and Louisiana Republicans then will change the law.

A bill that will soon be debated in the Louisiana legislature contains language that appears to clear the way for the state to use money from the potential privatization of the Office of Group Benefits (OGB), the agency that manages state employees' health insurance, to help plug a budget hole.

As the Associated Press reports, the "fund sweep" bill authored by House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Fannin (D) proposes to scrape $231 million from state agencies and put it into an "Overcollections Fund," which would help cover the state's $1.6 billion budget shortfall. This kind of "sweep" is not unusual in Louisiana -- though the size of this year's proposal is.

"Nobody would have wanted it if there'd been another source of money. Rather than continue to cut health and hospitals and continue to cut higher education, then they chose this way," Fannin told the AP.

But the bill also includes language that specifically addresses OGB, which manages the health insurance of around 250,000 people. 

So instead of asking "Why does this office manage insurance so well, and how can we use it to get more Louisiana residents insurance to protect them to benefit the people of the state?"  Jindal and his Republicans instead want to sell the agency to private insurance companies, deliver more expensive care at a higher cost to taxpayers for state employee benefits, and then of course he'll complain that state employees have too good of a deal and must have their benefits cut.  The answer to that question is because it removes the profit motive from the insurance industry and instead aims to try to find the best care at the best price.  This is anathema to the Republicans.

In effect, Jindal's taking the money now and screwing over both taxpayers and state employees later.  He has no interest in expanding or showcasing the program.  He wants it gone.  The private insurers in the state want that money, they want those 250,000 people on their more expensive plans to profit their companies.  And Jindal will deliver them.

This is how Republicans view government:  offices to be raided, to be privatized, and to put people at the mercy of profit margins rather than providing them reasonable insurance costs.  To do otherwise would prove that government can help the people.

And Republicans can't have that.