Although it was not lawmakers' highest priority, both the House and Senate worked throughout the legislative session to resolve once and for all the funding and organizational foundation of the Florida Workers' Compensation Joint Underwriting Association including paying off deficits in several ill-conceived coverage plans. Despite basically agreeing on a bill, lawmakers only reached a final agreement in the last hours and were forced to tuck the reforms in a bill implementing the state's budget. As far as Gov. Jeb Bush was concerned, however, that was not good enough as he used his line item veto pen to essentially strike down the measures ensuring that lawmakers will once again have to debate the issue next year.

An End Run that Failed

The FWCJUA is one of those issues that have fallen into the equivalent of a legislative purgatory. The subject is not pressing enough to force lawmakers to act immediately, but nonetheless it remains on the list of issues that needs to be resolved. It is also largely an issue of the lawmakers' own making. Caught up in the 2003 workers' comp reforms, lawmakers abandoned a decade-long policy that called for the FWCJUA to be self-funding in response to the lack of available and affordable coverage in the private market. In retrospect the change appears to have been premature given the fact that employers' rates would drop by some 30 percent over the next two years, including a 14 percent across-the-board rate cut immediately following the enactment of the reforms. But instead of calling for a reversal in policy, lawmakers have been mired down in trying to find an approach toward righting the FWCJUA. A problem made all the more complex due to the fact that the lawmakers blurred the line between solving the dollar and cents problems and the overarching policy question of the association's role as a residual insurer.