Last week in this space I wrote about Utah legislators' refusal to accept free tickets to Michael Moore's movie "Sicko" because of their strong aversion to "socialized medicine," while at the same time supporting Utah's "socialized" liquor industry.

This week's column is about their own ready acceptance of one piece of "socialized medicine" that hugely benefits themselves and their families.

Nearly a decade ago, the Legislature gave its members full retirement health-care coverage. In order to qualify, the part-time lawmaker must have served 10 years in the Legislature. That's five terms for representatives and two-and-a-half terms for senators. Eight years service nets 80 percent of full coverage, six years earns 60 percent and four years draws 40 percent.

Legislators can begin drawing the retirement insurance when they turn 62. At that time, the state pays about $12,000 a year for each retired legislator who qualifies for full coverage and carries insurance for the whole family. The lawmaker's co-pay is 8 percent - about $60 a month.

Once a legislator turns 65 and qualifies for Medicare, his or her state-funded health insurance becomes supplemental, which still costs the state close to $10,000 a year. That benefit, by the way, also will be available to Mike Leavitt, Utah's former governor. Now, as U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, Leavitt strenuously opposes expanding health-care coverage to more underprivileged children.

The Legislature, which meets in its full-time general session for 45 days a year, plus one full day of interim meetings each month when not in general session, decided in the 1990s that members deserved the same health care provided to full-time state employees - plus the retirement benefit if they stayed in the Legislature long enough.

The retirement health benefit was a bone the Legislature threw to state employees in the 1980s in lieu of adequate salary hikes just to keep them apace with inflation. The system allowed state employees to trade eight hours of unused sick leave for one month of health-care coverage upon retirement. So a 30-year employee who, for example, had 200 hours of unused sick leave, could get about 10 years of coverage.

But in 2005, the Legislature scotched that program. House Bill 213 offered instead to place the dollar value of the unused sick leave into a Health Savings Account, which the retired employee could draw upon to pay health-related expenses until the account ran out.

What that meant is that a state employee with a career-average salary of $20 an hour with, say, 1,000 hours of unused sick leave, would get $20,000 placed in his/her Health Savings Account. If that money was used to pay for full health-insurance coverage, it would last about two years.

The Legislature was sharply criticized by public employee advocacy groups for passing HB213 in 2005. So that bill's sponsor, Rep. Dave Clark, who now is the House majority leader, sponsored legislation in 2006 to repeal the top-of-the-line retirement insurance model that legislators had voted themselves.

After much blather and ballyhoo about how lawmakers should show public employees and all their constituents that they were willing to make the same sacrifice they had asked of state employees, Clark's bill passed the House 58-14. It then was sent to the Senate, where it died quietly in the Senate Rules Committee.

In the end, the health benefit that state employees received to mollify their concerns about low pay was stripped away, while the expensive "socialized" coverage that state lawmakers enjoy remains firmly in place.