Retirement
benefits must
be prudent

There was a time when the county commissioners treated health insurance like it was candy. The problem is that it’s more like gold.

As a result, the current group of commissioners must take a look at the current health insurance policy that awards lifetime health insurance to county employees, who can retire after 20 years.

The new health insurance policy puts as many as 60 employees in line for retirement with full health insurance benefits and/or a taxpayer-paid Medicare supplement. The cost per year: more than $500 per month per employee and rising.

Retirement policies for the public sector and private sector are vastly different. Many public sector jobs provide benefits like health insurance after a period of service, usually 20 or 30 years.

In the private sector, employees are fortunate if their companies can afford health insurance while they are employed, much less when they retire. It’s a policy that has nearly sunk the U.S. car industry.

On the flip side, benefits like lifetime health insurance are tools to retain good employees in the public sector, but commissioners and other policy makers must also be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, especially when those benefits extend well beyond service rendered.

Health insurance is insanely expensive, so it’s a hard sell to taxpayers when they realize that they are funding other people’s health insurance.

When decisions are made about long-term health insurance policies using taxpayer dollars, the costs must be considered.