Posts Tagged: retirees
Opinion
OPINION: Here’s the best advice: To the more than 3 million retirees, teachers, firefighters, nurses, police officers and other state and local government employees who rely on the state’s two largest pension funds: Do not be alarmed. To the critics who periodically predict – always following downward swings in the stock market – that the pension funds will someday not be able to meet their obligations: Do not be alarmist.
Opinion
OPINION: The U.S. health care system is in a moment of reckoning. No one pretends to have the perfect solution. But there is something consumers can agree on: More transparency is needed. Consumers and their employers, which insure 49 percent of American health coverage, are demanding to know exactly what goes in to their health care costs.
News
After a loss of $100 billion in the recent recession, the CalPERS funding level dropped from 100 percent in 2007 to 61 percent in 2009. It has not recovered, despite a major bull market in which the S&P 500 index of large stocks tripled. “Even with the dramatic returns we have seen over the past six years, because the demographics of plans in general have changed and plans are now by and large cash-flow negative, it’s been very challenging to dig out of that hole,” Andrew Junkin, a Wilshire consultant, told the CalPERS board last week.
News
The LAO, noting that most of Brown’s plan bypasses the Legislature, says lawmakers should hold hearings on state worker retiree health care, going back to square one, 1961, when the benefit began. Times were different then. Workers were at risk of losing health coverage when they retired. Now state workers are eligible for federal Medicare at age 65.
News
Calpensions: In a few years CalPERS retirees are expected to outnumber active workers, a national trend among public pension funds that makes them more vulnerable to big employer rate increases. The growing number of retirees, partly due to aging baby boomers, is one reason a staff report last week argues that CalPERS has too much “risk.”
News
Calpensions: A federal judge, who earlier ruled CalPERS pension contracts can be overturned in bankruptcy, yesterday outlined the difficulty of cutting pensions while approving Stockton’s plan to exit bankruptcy with pensions intact.
News
Calpensions: A federal judge ruled that CalPERS pensions can be cut in bankruptcy like other debt. He rejected the argument that the giant system is an “arm of the state” with pensions protected by federal law and two state laws on contracts and liens.
News
Backers of an initiative that would give new Ventura County employees a 401(k)-style plan, rather than a pension, sometimes mention a lawsuit filed last fall by a former sheriff. Bob Brooks, whose salary as Ventura County sheriff was $227,600 a year when he retired in January 2011, received an annual pension of $283,000. He filed a suit last September seeking an additional pension of $75,000 under a supplemental plan.
News
A superior court judge overturned a freeze on retiree health care for Los Angeles city attorneys this month, citing some of the same case law that made public pensions a vested right that can only be cut if offset by a new benefit.
A view across the river of the CalSTRS headquarters in West Sacramento. (Photo: ImageAllan, via Shutterstock)
