Who is going to pay... for all that unfunded insurance
Readers of this blog have certainly read about the problems facing this Town and State and country for that matter.. regarding the un funded insurance liabilities for public employees past and present.
If Deval and the Legislature can't get something done now ... this Town will be be dire shape.
From the Globe:
“It’s the equivalent of a gigantic credit card debt which grows and grows the longer it is ignored,’’ said Michael J. Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a business-funded nonprofit research organization.
The Taxpayers Foundation yesterday released its first-of-its-kind report, which measures the size of the unfunded liability cities and towns face over the next 30 years for retiree health care benefits. The foundation based its findings on actuarial studies for each city and town looking at the long-term costs of paying health insurance benefits.
The Taxpayers Foundation determined that the 50 largest municipalities will need to pay an extra $20 billion for retiree health care than they have budgeted for. Boston has an unfunded health insurance liability of more than $4.5 billion over the next 30 years, the study found, which translates to $97,827 in extra tax payments for the average single-family homeowner over the 30 years.
posted by Jim Pillsbury @ 1:36 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
Unfunded health insurance costs are going to kill this country. WI unions are screaming aobut breaking unions. Maybe it is time for that to happen if the union members think they are above being impacted by the recession the rest of us are facing. Paying union dues does not mean you get to ignore reality.
This blog has made it a lot more difficult to post anything here unless you post as anonymous, so from here on in, I am going to do that. Anyway I am wondering if what is going on in WI is likely to happen here when we negotiate the contracts for union employees for the town. A few questions for you Jim. What contracts are up for negotiations this year, and what are the dates the current contracts expire for those? Who negotiates for the town, and is the town taking the position in those negotiations that health care benefits have got to change?
Everyone talks about this and how bad it is, and then the CFO Kelley stands up and says we are ok spending money on all these other things as if we don’t have to worry about this. So, either people are trying to make a big deal out of nothing, or the town’s CFO does not know what she is doing. I would be interested in finding out which of those is actually the case.
This is the story we should all be paying attention to and it is directly influenced by the people who will be watched via the corruption story here. If the unions in MA are allowed to continue running this state by being big contributors in both money and labor to political compaigns we will never survive this economic meltdown. Unions have a valid reason for exsiting, but too many of them lately have lost touch with reality and seem to think they are above the frey. Well they are not. If they think they are entitled to that cheap health care, then they should think everyone is entitled to it. So lets all get the same coverage option the unions get. Our taxes would all go sky high, but then they can’t complain about that, we are just getting what they have had for years and years now.
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