Free Republic

The shrinkage of employee retirement resources in the US has been well documented, as employers shift more risk onto their workers. Less so is the rate at which employers have been eliminating healthcare benefits for retirees. As the Kaiser Family Foundation recently reported, retiree health coverage is becoming an endangered species. "Employer-sponsored retiree health coverage once played a key role in supplementing Medicare," observe Tricia Neuman of the foundation. "Any way you slice it, this coverage is eroding." The chances of reversing this trend, plainly, are nil. But it's important to keep an eye on it, if only as a...

For decades, California has been promising its employees health care for life in retirement if they worked at least 10 years for the state. For as long as that promise has been offered, however, no one ever bothered to add up how much it would cost to keep. As more employees retired, and lived longer, and health care costs rose, the bill kept rising. The state paid it every year for those already retired. But still no one thought to figure out how much it would cost to keep paying that bill for all the employees still working for the...