Screwing us over, yet again

You gotta hand it to our state legislators, especially those serving in the Senate. They know all about shared sacrifice.

They just define it a little differently than you or I would. They believe it means pretending to sacrifice, but really making future generations pay so they don't have to.

They proved this last week, big-time — especially the Republicans, though the mealy-mouthed Democrats were nearly as bad. They sniveled, as always, and then took their share.

What Your Elected Representatives will tell you is that they heroically acted to help save the state by voting to give up lifetime health care benefits for retired lawmakers.

That is true of many in the House. Two-thirds of them will lose their retirement health care. But not the state senators. What they mostly voted to do was to deny benefits to people who haven't been elected yet, and who could, once they get there, change the law back.

But as for our current band of senators — all but two of the 38 voted to keep their lifetime benefits, thank you very much.

Here's how all this started. Republicans as a species hate the idea of universal health care insurance for everyone, and they especially hate that President Obama managed to get Congress last year to pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

They've been lying their pants off about what it means ever since. But it apparently dimly dawned on those in the Michigan Legislature that it would be a trifle tricky to continue screaming for this "socialist" health care bill to be repealed while keeping for themselves a much better, taxpayer-subsidized lifetime health care plan.

What they get is certainly better than you have, something the conservative Grand Rapids Press called "a staggering symbol of political class entitlement." Until now, all you had to do is manage to serve six years in the Legislature, reach age 55, and then get 90 percent of your health care costs covered — for life.

Incidentally, they've been getting this perk since an overwhelmingly Republican set of lawmakers voted to give it to themselves in 1957. But this year, with the heat on, the Michigan House of Representatives voted to eliminate the retirement benefit, for all but a small handful of those who started before 2007. 

They sent it on to the state Senate, whose members looked at it and said, "Wait just a minute, kids. Sure, it may be politically popular to give up our benefits, but we want to keep ours!"

So the Senate passed a different bill — one that gave lawmakers up to 2013 to get their six years in. That meant that 90 of the 138 House members were out of luck, for now, anyway. But all but two of the state senators will still get retirement health care for life!

> Email Jack Lessenberry