You know who does not get coverage through Cover Oregon and should? Oregon legislators.

Back in 2011, in what now looks like the good old days of health reform in Oregon, our legislators passed Senate Bill 99. It eventually became Cover Oregon. Oregon’s lawmakers and governor chose to birth a homegrown Oregon solution and not go with the federal health insurance website.

It was a well-intentioned idea. It created favorable buzz about Oregon being a leader in health care.

Buzz, though, is not a barometer of accomplishment. Instead of accomplishment, Cover Oregon birthed homegrown delays, shifty deadlines and finger pointing. We hope those will get fixed soon.

Legislators demanded answers to those problems in recent hearings. They declared them unacceptable. Gov. John Kitzhaber moved in more personnel to manually march through the healthcare paperwork.

Rep. Julie Parrish, R-West Linn, offered a more impressive vision of reform. She says she will introduce legislation next year to put legislators and statewide elected officials through Cover Oregon to get care.

The state health care benefits many legislators and Kitzhaber enjoy are through the Public Employees’ Benefit Board.

They are rich benefits.

We tried to figure out what Kitzhaber might have to pay to get the benefits through the plans on the Cover Oregon website that he could get under PEBB plans. It’s not an apples to apples comparison. Frankly, you don’t get apples like the PEBB apples on Cover Oregon. But it looks like he’d have to pay upward of $600 a month to get anything even close, at least in terms of deductible.

Just imagine what might have happened if legislators and Kitzhaber knew they would go through Cover Oregon, too. It would have been personal. We hope they would be more worried about the website. We hope they would be more worried about the delays.

Would that have made a difference? Maybe, maybe not.

What it would certainly do is enforce the view that our elected leaders are not elected into privilege and perks but elected to serve.