State Budget Update

The State Budget is now in Conference Committee. Your action is needed on two key issues:

1. State Employee Health Insurance:
• The House version of the budget includes an 80/20 split for all current state workers and a 75/25 split for new workers hired after July 1, 2009.

• The Senate budget moves all state workers to 75/25.

While both proposals are certainly better than the original plan to move to 70/30, the House language is clearly superior, representing a 33% difference in premium share from the Senate plan.

2. Pacheco Law Change:

The Senate budget includes language to increase the Pacheco Law threshold from $200,000 to $2 million. As you know the Pacheco Law protects Massachusetts tax payers from costly and wasteful attempts to privatize public employee work. We need to make sure that this language is not included in the Conference Committee Report, which is the final version of the budget that will be sent to Governor Patrick.

Please take action on these two key issues by sending an email to key legislators on Beacon Hill.