North Carolina General Assembly (File Photo)

North Carolina public school teachers and state employees are badly underpaid. The chief cause: repeated and regressive tax cuts enacted by Republican legislators that have caused state revenues (as a share of the economy) to plummet over the past 15 years.

Today, even states like Alabama and Mississippi do a better job of funding government.

Amazingly, however, the situation is about to get worse.

Thanks to the legislature’s ongoing failure to appropriate adequate funds and to require transparency in the contracts the State Health Plan negotiates with insurers and providers, the plan has a half-billion dollar deficit.

And last week, plan trustees said they would impose sizable new premium hikes on enrollees of hundreds of dollars per year to close the gap.

And this is simply wrong.

The bottom line: the planned State Health Plan premium hikes are just the latest example of how our state legislature continues to wage an ideological war on public employees and, ultimately, the public services on which we all should have a right to depend.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.