I'm still around...
What a busy couple of weeks!
Thank you all for the kind "Where the heck have you been?" emails.
The end-of-year activities for both of my kids have kicked into high gear, along with the beginning of summer activities around the house.
Plus, last week included a board meeting, plus three consecutive nights of commencement ceremonies for each of our high school graduating seniors.
I've got plenty of accumulated stuff in the "to be shared" folder, so check back soon. Note that you can set your browser to receive my RSS feed, or register on with Feedburner in the area on the right to receive email notification of new posts.
In the meantime, check out this great editorial:
Detroit News: Michigan must streamline cost of employee benefits (06/11/07)
I absolutely agree with the premise of the article, which is that, "The structural deficit plaguing state government can't be erased for the long term without a radical restructuring of public employee benefits. This is perhaps the most pressing reform the state must make as it turns the budget crisis into an opportunity to create a more efficient and sensible government."
However, I'm not sure that insurance pooling is the panacea that some are making it out to be. More on that soon...
As an interesting aside, I thought the Rochester Board of Education fully deserved the dishonorable mention in today's Detroit News editorial, which read, "School districts must be financially punished by the state if they do what Rochester schools recently did and approve contracts that maintain the health insurance status quo, which in that community costs $15,000 annually per teacher."
2 comments:
It looks like the only way to save this is to severely cut the rising cost of benefits.
However; the state mandate that local units make cuts or face punishment will be difficult.
The benefits are negotiated individually at the local level.
Would a state wide negotiated beneift package make more sense?
After all that are indirect employees of the state.
Translation: "Workers must have cost and risk foisted onto their backs and they must be the ones to fix the health care problem in this country because it's a global economy and our good American companies will go overseas at a drop of the hat where all they to pay workers is a bowl of rice a day."
Yeah, we get it.
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