A few years ago NESPA went through an exhaustive effort to offer group health insurance to our members at affordable rates which would have been below the then existing exorbitant commercial market premiums.  Unfortunately as hard as we tried, we ran into brick walls from both the Federal ERISA laws and state insurance regulations which prevented us from developing a program.  When George W. Bush was president he had proposed, and even gotten passed in the House of Representatives, a bill to allow trade associations, such as ours, to offer these types of group health insurance plans.  Unfortunately the measure always stalled in the Senate where the state insurance regulators were able to prevail upon that more conservative body  to squelch the plan.   Fast forward to 2009 and look what is happening in the Senate with President Obama’s plan to reform health care.  The Republicans don’t want a public option insurance plan where people would be able to purchase health insurance through a government program because, being the shills they are for the insurance industry they fear that this would invoke real competition and (gasp!) force them to curtail some of their outrageous profits.  The Democrats on the other hand, never being able to say no to bigger and more costly government programs, are insistent that the government get into the insurance industry – I guess they need to complete the rest of their investment portfolio now that they own the auto and financial market industries.  But I digress. 

Lo and behold along comes Sen. Max Baucus, (D-MT) who heads the Senate Committee responsible for writing the bill, and who has come up with a compromise plan that – wait for the drumroll – would allow trade associations and other groups to form large co-ops (sort of  like a buying group) to offer health insurance benefits to their members.  The idea being that if we could group ourselves together with thousands of bodies to insure, the risk gets spread out and the costs come down for everybody.  Somebody give President Bush a poke and tell him that one of his domestic initiatives is alive and well, but don’t tell anyone else or the plan will go nowhere.