Utah legislators, as part-time state workers, are eligible for a package of benefits that includes the health insurance offered to other state employees, including highway patrol officers, motor vehicles clerks and wildlife resource officers.

Under legislation tweaked several times over the years, retired lawmakers also are eligible for medical coverage, depending on when they retire and how many years they have served in the Legislature. Lawmakers who were elected before 2012 and have served 10 years or more can have 100 percent of their health insurance costs covered by taxpayers for life.

The House and Senate denied The Salt Lake Tribune's open-records requests for documents explaining members' insurance benefits and declined to say how many and which lawmakers participate.

The state's Public Employees Health Program declined to provide an exact number or the names of lawmakers who participate, citing the federal health care privacy act, HIPAA.

PEHP did say, however, that year in and year out, more than 90 percent of the 104 lawmakers take one of the insurance plans offered to state employees. And it provided information about the plans.

As soon as they take office, legislators qualify for the same three plans as other state employees, including all permanent full-timers and some part-timers who work at least 20 hours a week.

The plans are called Traditional, STAR and Utah Basic Plus, and each has two tiers distinguished by which network of doctors and hospitals the employee wants to use. STAR and the high-deductible Utah Basic Plus offer tiers that require no monthly premium payments from employees.

Of the state's 23,300 employees, 18,900 take one of the plans.

And whichever route lawmakers choose Healthy Utah, which would cover 89,000 Utahns; or Utah Cares, which proposes to expand coverage to half that number their own insurance is pretty deluxe, said Sen. Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City.

"It is shameful for all of us who have the best health care coverage in the state, which is PEHP, to talk about people who do not have coverage and think that's OK," she said when the Senate was debating a Medicaid expansion bill.

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