GUTHRIE - State Rep. Jason Murphey continued his mid-March tradition of presenting a yearly donation of $8,241.92 from his legislative salary to officials from Crossroads, An Open Door For Life Choices, Inc., located in Guthrie. Crossroads provides faith-based, pro-life counseling and support services to expectant mothers.

Murphey said that Oklahoma legislators are some of the highest paid part-time legislators in the nation, making more than double the regional average. He is using the donation to demonstrate that legislators in Oklahoma should not be paid so much more than other legislators in the region and to illustrate the importance of pro-life services such as Crossroads.

“In order to reform government, we must cut out wasteful state government spending. I hope most would agree that it is not a good principle to pay legislators more than double the regional average,” said Murphey, R-Guthrie.

Crossroads is a Christian-based non-profit organization focused on supporting the values of the sanctity of human life, pre-marital abstinence, and marital fidelity.

The services provided included limited pregnancy related medical services, options education, client advocacy, support for prenatal care, parenting education, post-abortion peer counseling, and abstinence education.

Crossroads offers abortion-vulnerable women a scan to confirm viable pregnancies. Statistics show that 89 percent of abortion-minded women choose life for their unborn babies after seeing them through ultrasound and receiving truthful information about their options.

The amount donated reflects the difference in legislative pay and the per capita pay in Oklahoma at the time Murphey was elected. During his 2006 campaign for office, Murphey pledged to continue making the yearly pledge until legislative salaries are adjusted. Murphey sponsors legislation to accomplish this goal during each term of the Legislature.

This is the time of year when the previous year’s legislative initiatives have started to go into law and they are quickly becoming of significant effect.

For instance, in the next few weeks the first State Government 2.0 data feeds, sponsored by Senator Anthony Sykes and myself, are set to go online. These were approved in last year’s Senate Bill 1759. I look forward to providing you with the information about these feeds and their far-reaching implications in enhancing transparency.

Also recently placed online were the Open Books 2.0 state government spending transparency enhancements which were approved in House Bill 3422. This legislation was sponsored by current state Treasurer Ken Miller and state Senator Clark Jolley and requested by the grassroots group Oklahomans for Responsible Government (OFRG). The legislation will enhance your right to see how state government spends your money. State officials are now required to post every single spending transaction in a searchable and exportable format. These new features were placed online at the website openbooks.ok.gov within the past few weeks.

I will be the first to admit that the Open Books user interface is a bit clunky and I am not sure that all of the requirements of the legislation have been complied with. For instance, the exportable functionality is almost impossible to find and users must search for the recipients of government spending in all caps. This no doubt discourages usage and must be fixed. But it’s also fair to say that the product still empowers citizens as never before.

For example, last week the issue of whether or not taxpayers dollars should be going to a controversial organization like Planned Parenthood started to be debated in the national news.

It is of course little surprise to realize that federal taxpayer dollars are going to this organization. However, are state taxpayers also funding Planned Parenthood?

Using the Open Books system, with just a few clicks you can see that over $230,000 have been paid by the State Department of Health to Planned Parenthood during the current fiscal year. Without the transparency provided by Open Books, I doubt that very many people would ever know about this spending.

Readers may recall my past articles about the very bad policy of legislative earmarking. For instance, in 2007 I wrote about an earmark for an organization known only as A Pocket Full of Hope. In 2009, I wrote that legislative earmarks were starting to disappear as the state budget was forced to contract because of the economic downturn. However, even though the earmark is gone, according to Open Books, A Pocket Full of Hope is still on the public dole. This raises the disturbing possibility that legislators are still verbally directing agencies behind the scenes on how to spend money. How many other former earmarks are still taking place away from the purview of the public?

Once the user interface is more functional and its usage becomes more widespread, the Open Books platform will transform the way citizens hold government accountable. State government officials will become very cautious when they spend taxpayer dollars because they will understand that you will be reviewing their expenditures.

And now we also have a powerful new tool as legislators to do our job as policy makers to guard taxpayer dollars.

During my last three updates I have written about the reforms proposed in this year’s Senate Bill 2052 — and I have explained our goal of driving down costs to Oklahoma taxpayers by providing health insurance to state and education employees.

The bill sought to use some of the more innovative concepts which are working in the free market. I believe if these ideas were replicated by more businesses in the private sector and organizations such as the state of Oklahoma, the result would be a reduction in health care costs. This would deprive the federal government of their number one issue for advocating for the expansion of the federal government’s role in health care.

I originally wrote this series of articles in response to a constituent who supports the federal legislation. He asked why those of us who oppose the federal legislation did not introduce ideas of our own, so I made a note to write about innovative ways to control health care costs.

It is important to note that these innovative reforms were not the only components of Senate Bill 2052. The effort to draft this legislation started after the state’s self insurance program failed to pay many doctor’s claims in a timely manner. This prompted a number of health care providers to contact their legislators and ultimately resulted in the creation of a legislative working group to review the manner in which the state manages its health insurance program. The legislation evolved to address any number of health care reform issues, most of which I have not yet had the opportunity to write about.

One major outcome of this legislation (had it not been vetoed by the Governor) would have been the consolidation of the two agencies which manage health care benefits. There has been enormous tension between these two agencies because consolidation has been viewed by past legislatures as the logical starting place for achieving cost savings due to the duplicative nature of their organizational structures. Each of these agencies has worried about being consolidated into the other and this tension has resulted in a huge amount of political intrigue as they have battled for survival by building relationships with legislators over the years.

Because of these battles, the consolidation has never been implemented, even though the streamlining of benefits administration is extremely practical. Senate Bill 2052 represented the breakthrough that put aside politics, consolidated administrative functions and sought to realize what may have amounted to million of dollars in savings for Oklahoma taxpayers.

I have enjoyed the opportunity to present this legislation to the House and look forward to advancing these reforms once again during the next legislative session.

I was privileged to serve on the legislative task force charged with designing this year’s omnibus state employee health care insurance reform plan (Senate Bill 2052). In creating this plan we attempted to draw heavily on best practices which are stabilizing health care costs for other organizations.

One of those best practices is the plan used by the State of Indiana to incentivize the wise use of its state employee health insurance plan through the implementation of Health Savings Accounts.

The Indiana plan was developed by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels in an effort to provide a consumer directed health care option to state employees.

In the Indiana’s HSA, the state deposits an amount of money into an account which is controlled by the state employee, from which the employee pays all his or her health bills. This amount of money can be used to pay co-pays and deductibles and unused money can roll over from year to year. The idea is that plan participants will become more cost-conscious, have a sense of ownership over the money and thus be more careful about over-utilization of health care services or overpayment related to health care charges.

The plan has proven to be popular in Indiana as 70% of its state employees have chosen to use this plan compared to just 2% of public sector employees across the nation. Savings have also been significant as participants in the plan save more than 8 million dollars per year when compared to participants in traditional health care plans. Indiana HSA plan participants spent just 65 dollars for every 100 dollars expended by those taking part in the traditional health care plan.

It is this cost savings that we attempted to achieve in Senate Bill 2052. Working with the organizations representing public employees we sought to guarantee that future state employee health insurance benefit increases would be rolled into funding this plan.

Common sense suggests that when an employee is given the opportunity to have direct ownership over his or her health care dollars, they will make choices to protect that balance from unnecessary expenditures. However, if we continue to utilize a traditional one-size-fits-all health care insurance funding option then it is to be expected that costs will continue to increase. Governor Daniels summed it up this way, “What seems free will always be overconsumed, compared to the choices a normal consumer would make.”

I was very disappointed that our Governor chose to veto Senate Bill 2052. I look forward to once again passing this reform and the health and wellness reform which I wrote about last week. I believe we will have this opportunity when the new Governor takes office next year.

Last week I wrote an update in which I opined the necessity for state leaders to closely observe the ways free market organizations are using best practices to drive down health care costs. Like all state government spending, it is extremely important for us to work hard to maximize taxpayer dollars through the application of market-based solutions, and pass on as much savings as possible. It is also important for these solutions to be utilized to stop the increase in health care costs and thus take away the primary argument for those who wish to expand the role of the federal government in health care.

Last year I sent out an update stating that I would be involved in a legislative working group charged with analyzing the government’s employee insurance program. A constituent recipient of the update encouraged me to look at the program used by the Safeway Corporation to stabilize their health insurance cost. This concept would become one of the most important components of the state employee health insurance reform proposal (SB 2052) passed by the Legislature but vetoed by the Governor.

The Safeway plan is completely voluntary and drives down costs by incentivizing wellness and prevention by rewarding plan participant through lower health insurance premium costs.

The Safeway plan focuses on two base prevention concepts. The company ascertained that 70% of health care costs are the result of the lifestyle choices and 74% of all health care costs are related to the following four chronic conditions: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer. They believe that 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes are preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable, and at least 90% of obesity cases can be prevented.

The company observed that these conditions could be prevented by incentivizing employees to voluntarily address the issues of tobacco usage, healthy weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

The results have been dramatic. Since the program was started in 2005, Safeway has kept their per capita health care cost stable at a time when most companies’ costs went up by 38%. Their obesity and smoking rates are roughly 70% of the national average. 78% of employees rated the plan positively and many employees lost weight and lowered blood-pressure and cholesterol levels.

In my view, it is our job as Oklahoma legislators to implement a similar program and pass on the savings not only to state government entities, but also to county and school board governing entities which use the state employee insurance programs.

Incorporating a localized version of this program in Senate Bill 2052 was something which the entire legislative working group insisted on. Our version of this approach was designed to save taxpayer funds and to allow employees to lower their deductible and co-pay costs. I believe we are still committed to securing legislative approval for the concept in the next legislative session.

Most importantly, this approach addresses the right way to achieve health care reform because it will encourage employers working with their employees to drive down the cost, instead of the federal government getting involved with various mandates.

Next week I will write about another of the market-based concepts incorporated into Senate Bill 2052.

I have always enjoyed the dialog I have with House District 31 residents following the release of my weekly update. Their responses to these updates provide the opportunity to have an ongoing conversation about the issues of importance and I absolutely benefit from that feedback.

I recently wrote an update about the effort to allow you to vote on opting-out of the federal health care proposal. You will have this opportunity in November. In response to that update one of the individuals who supports the federal health care proposal wrote in response stating that it is important for those of us in opposition to point to alternatives to the proposed federal government action. She is absolutely right to make this point. As I have observed the legislative process it seems to me that there is little more frustrating than dealing with a policy maker who says “no” to other people’s ideas but does not come forward with ideas for providing another solution. I informed her that I would endeavor to write future updates about the possible solutions to health care cost issues which could be incorporated without government involvement. This is one of those articles.

In this case the problem is the rising cost of health care insurance. This rising cost has given liberal politicians all the ammunition they need in order to attempt to provide lower cost government solutions.

I am a big believer that given time the free market will provide these solutions. I was very much re-affirmed in that belief starting in the spring of 2009 when I was appointed to participate in a working group which was seeking to analyze some of the challenges faced by the state employee health insurance system. This working group evolved into a type of statutorily created task force whose suggestions were incorporated into legislation this past year. During that time I believe I invested more of my time into researching and advocating for reforms to the state employee health insurance system than to most other areas of policy.

As you might imagine, one of the largest costs to the State of Oklahoma is the insurance it provides to the thousands of state employees and their dependants as well as the employees of other government entities such as school districts and county governments.

As a working group one of our tasks was to look at free market solutions and seek to apply these solutions in order to realize cost savings to the taxpayers and the various government entities which must purchase this insurance.

Working with State Representative Lewis Moore and State Senators Cliff Aldrige and Bill Brown and House and Senate leadership we worked to create an initiative which included free market approaches to driving down health costs, secured the support of the state employee and teachers associations and won legislative approval before being unfortunately and somewhat unexpectedly vetoed by the Governor.

During next week’s update I will write about these solutions and my vision for their possible inclusion in future legislation.

Oklahoma State Representative Jason Murphey (R-Guthrie) will provide keynote remarks to the Public Safety GIS User Group of the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS Foundation on June 25 at 9:00 a.m. Murphey’s presentation will occur at the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City. The user group workshop is sponsored by the Oklahoma Council of Firefighter Training, Lincoln, Nebraska Police Department and Oklahoma State Fire Marshall’s office. It is designed to assist public safety leaders in Oklahoma, Nebraska and Kansas in gaining new ideas about the use of geographic information technologies to solve public safety challenges.

Murphey, who chairs the House of Representatives’ Government Modernization Committee and the Oklahoma Integrated Justice Information Systems Steering (OIJIS) Committee, will speak to the group about the importance of the utilization of geographic information systems (GIS) in coordinating emergency response. Murphey is also expected to emphasize the responsible use of technology and to encourage open source and Government 2.0 transparency components of the technology which will allow for greater interaction between the public and public safety officials at a lower cost to taxpayers.

“It is a moral imperative for public safety agencies to quickly deploy new technologies to provide life saving services. These technologies allow life saving services to be provided in a more transparent and responsive manner than ever before,” Murphey said.

Murphey has long been an advocate of public safety and law enforcement policy issues. Murphey serves on the House Public Safety Committee and won approval for House Bill 2215 during the 2008 legislative session, which allows the Department of Public Safety to streamline the process for building a practice firing range for State Troopers with donated resources. “It is always exciting to have the opportunity to bring two of my most emphasized policy initiatives (technology and public safety) together in a presentation,” Murphey said.

For additional information about the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS Foundation, visit http://www.publicsafetygis.org/.

House Joint Resolution 1056 directs that Oklahoma voters be asked to approve an amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution to prohibit state courts from using international or other forms of law when making decisions. You may have seen the bill’s author Representative Rex Duncan explaining this legislation on the Sean Hannity show last Friday night. Passage of this proposal would make Oklahoma the first state to propose this pre-emptive strike on the use of Islamic and international law to guide the decisions of Oklahoma judges. The proposal was seen by the Legislature as a necessary step in light of the fact that Sharia courts have been established in Great Britain and international law has been used as a possible guiding legal example by a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

State Question Number 746 would establish a voter ID requirement such as a driver’s license or voter ID card. This has been an important issue which the Legislature has considered a number of times before finally meeting with success in sending the issue to a vote of the people.

State Question 751 establishes the English language as the language to be used by state government. This legislation would establish the principle that a lawsuit could not be filed according to state law against the state or county governments because the state or county did not use a language other than English.

Senate Joint Resolution 59, a resolution which I co-sponsored, would prohibit laws making a person or employer use a particular health care system. It is Oklahoma’s response to the recent federal health care proposal and it is known as Oklahoma’s opt-out proposal. I believe if enough states approve these types of proposals, the federal governments health care expansion could be significantly reduced.

There is one issue that should also have been on this list of important ballot questions. This issue is the idea that property taxes should be capped at no more than a 3% increase each year. I am very disappointed that the Legislature did not give the people to right to vote on property tax reform this year.

There are a series of other state questions which will also be on the ballot. If you would like more information about these, please do not hesitate to contact me.

A few weeks ago I wrote an update regarding the effort to ask the Oklahoma Ethics Commission to create a “No Gifts List” by which lawmakers who do not wish to receive personal gifts from lobbyists would have an official mechanism for making their intentions known.

When I first entered the Legislature, I did so on a platform that I would not accept personal gifts or political contributions from lobbyists or groups which hire lobbyists and I have since indicated this desire by posting a sign on my office door to make it clear that these gifts should not be left at my office. I have often said that if just a few lawmakers will prove it is possible to hold office without taking from lobbyists then eventually Oklahomans in other districts will start to expect that their elected official will make this same commitment.

At the time of my first election, legislators collectively accepted tens of thousands of dollars of personal gifts. The majority of this gift giving was related to meals and entertainment. Paying for expensive meals has historically been the tool by which lobbyists built friendships with legislators, subsequently ensuring they have a pre-existing relationship with the policy makers who vote on legislation affecting their clients. The thought that the legislators could pick up their own tab has historically been rather alien in form.

Since that time, with the institution of new ethics rules, the amount of gift giving has dropped to just a fraction of what it used to be. Not only that, but a number of lawmakers are now willing to come forward and assert their desire to avoid receiving these gifts.

When I wrote the letter to the Ethics Commission I asked several of my colleagues if they would be willing to sign the letter along with me. I was very excited when six of these individuals expressed their willingness to sign the letter and support the “No Gifts List” proposal.

They were State Senators Bill Brown, Anthony Sykes and Randy Brogdon and State Representatives Charles Key, Mike Reynolds and Mike Ritze. In my view, signing the letter represented a very courageous effort by these individuals.

In addition Senators Anthony Sykes and Jim Halligan and Representative Mike Reynolds have also posted signs in their offices politely stating that they do not wish to receive lobbyist gifts.

In other words, the belief that it is inappropriate for legislators to receive personal gifts from the vested special interest is slowly becoming institutionalized. I believe we will see the day when legislators no longer live the high life on the lobbyist dime. I have a tremendous amount of respect for my colleagues who are pioneering this line of thought and in so doing are establishing a stronger ethical standard which I believe will be followed by Oklahoma’s policy makers in the future.

In the last few days I have started to see firsthand how the legislative actions of the past few weeks are having an immediate effect on those I represent. Last week, I was contacted by an individual who lives in my district. He is a small businessman who owns a vending machine business. He places vending machines at several locations in the Oklahoma City area and supplies those machines with various products.

Over the past few years his bottom line has been affected in all of the ways you might expect. From the increased cost of fueling his supply truck to the increased cost of purchasing the products that go into the vending machine, he has been dealing with all of the inflationary pressures that most small business owners are experiencing. You can only imagine how shocked he was when on Tuesday of last week he saw a news story explaining the implications of legislation which was passed late in the session. The bill was designed to increase state government revenue by 5.7 million dollars by tripling the annual fee which vending machine operators must pay to the state (from $50 per machine to $150 per machine). This is a 300% fee increase on these businesses.

This fee will be devastating to the small business owners who will now face a series of tough decisions regarding the profitability of their business. The first step they will have to take will be to remove vending machines which are marginally profitable. The fee increase alone may erase the entire profitability of some of the marginal revenue producing machines. This will result in less availability of these products to the public and will mean that fewer vending machines stamps will be purchased from the state, which in turn will result in declining revenues to the government. In other words, those who designed this plan as a revenue enhancement may actually be thwarted in their attempt to generate additional revenue.

In other locations, the vending machine suppliers may simply choose to try to pass on the cost of the increased fees to the public. This means you and I will pay the cost through higher prices. However, this, too, will result in declining revenues, because higher prices will result in less demand and thus fewer products being sold. In some cases, older vending machines do not allow for pricing above a certain amount. This means that the vending machine companies will have to replace otherwise fine equipment in order to raise prices.

My constituent is in the process of computing the numbers and determining if he will be able to remain in business. If he does remain in business, it will likely be with fewer machines. This means less buying options for the public, less revenue for the government and a clear demonstration of the punitive effects of this type of policy on the state’s economy. It is state government’s job to provide an economic climate which makes it easier for small businesses to succeed. State government should never punish small businesses with a 300% fee increase.