By Sam Thomas
DOWNS- Republican State Senator Chapin Rose (IL-51) held a town hall meeting Tuesday evening at Tri-Valley Middle School in Downs.
Rose opened the event with a breakdown of Illinois’ FY16 general fund spending levels in a pie-chart format before spending the next half-hour hitting topics that ranged from K-12 funding to worker’s compensation reform in the state.
The Mahomet Republican then fielded questions from the dozen-or-so people in attendance.
Responding to a question about Medicaid reform in the state, Rose said that the Affordable Care Act-also referred to as “Obamacare”-has cost the state more money than people think.
“I will not stand for the people that say, ‘Well, Obamacare doesn’t cost the states anything.’ That’s BS [sic],” Rose said. “You’ve seen the data. It costs everybody big time.”
Rose also heard from an attendee asking what worker’s compensation reform would look like in a democrat-controlled House and Senate.
While he didn’t have a specific answer, Rose made the claim that worker’s compensation laws are too lax in the Prairie State. He pointed to the “traveling employees” clause that requires employers to compensate workers that succumb to injury regardless of whether or not the injury was sustained on the job.
“The traveling employee scenario can get so crazy that you can make the argument that if you walk out of your own house on your way to work and slip and fall on ice…that you can bill your employer a worker’s compensation claim even if you never made it to the car,” he remarked.
Rose also took a question that referenced, among other things, how Illinois can keep jobs from leaving the state.
Rose made a claim that worker’s compensation rates are a primary driver of the out-migration of jobs in Illinois, going so far as to say that the closure of the Mitsubishi plant in Normal could even be linked to high worker’s compensation costs.
“I’m not going to pretend to know what everyone’s worker’s compensation rates are,” Rose said. “But what do you think Mitsubishi’s compensation rates are [sic]? I don’t know either. But I’m telling you we have to fix the cost of doing business in Illinois to protect incumbent providers.”
Rose is set to travel east for another town hall Wednesday evening in Paris, Ill.
Sam Thomas can be reached at Sam@WJBC.com.
