I’m not sure if you’ve seen the recent articles about the State Health Plan—but according to Treasurer Dale Folwell, we’ve got about two years before the plan runs out of money under its current funding level. That’s entirely due to the legislature’s unwillingness to fund the Health Plan at the level they need to.
As anyone who’s paid attention over the last decade of Republican governance can see, the strategy of “slash funding, slash revenues, and pray” that has been the GOP legislative leadership’s north star is draining our Health Plan is threatening to leave our state employees high and dry. When even Dale Folwell is taking his own party to task over their extreme fiscal irresponsibility, you know that this is a bad situation.
The North Carolina State Health Plan serves nearly half a million active employees and dependents and more than 200,000 retirees. A public sector employer of some kind is the largest employer in 61 out of North Carolina’s 100 counties, and is in the top five employers in all 100 counties. Every single North Carolinian depends on our public employees, and our public employees depend on a high-quality, financially solvent State Health Plan.
Here’s the thing, John. It doesn’t matter what policy you champion or what bills you pass. You can’t have good government if you don’t have good people working for the government. Without that, nothing functions, ever.
And with one in four public positions currently sitting vacant, if we can’t even offer prospective employees reliable health care, we can’t attract the high-quality employees we need to come work for the government.
This is a self-inflicted wound due to Republican leadership, and we have to stem the bleeding before it’s too late. As Dale Folwell put it (even a broken clock is right twice a day): “We need [the General Assembly] to fully fund the State Health Plan based on the cost. Period.”
That’s a huge part of why I’ve beaten the drum this whole election cycle about how this campaign is about so much more than just my race. If we want to see change in how our state is run, we have to take back our entire state government, and that means focusing on uplifting Democrats from the top to the bottom of the ballot.
That’s why this is a 100-county campaign—because unless we chart a realistic course toward taking back the NC General Assembly, nothing will change, and unless we reach voters in all 100 counties and show them that Democrats are the party that’s fighting for them, we’ll never expand our legislative bench enough. And to do that, I need you to be with me. I need your support.
