Retirement
benefit must
be reviewed

The county commissioners will soon have to take a hard look at medical insurance benefits for retired employees.

It’s difficult enough to fund health insurance for the county’s 500 active employees – about $3.6 million – but the hit to taxpayers just to provide health insurance to retired employees in fiscal 2008-2009 is more than $300,000, about $48,000 more than fiscal 2007-2008.

And that’s just for 41 participants. Eventually, the load could be a staggering blow to taxpayers if health insurance and Medicare supplement costs continue to escalate. Sooner or later, the piper must be paid.

Granted, the health insurance retirement benefit has allowed the county to keep a number of hard-working employees with the promise of free health insurance for life, perhaps as soon as age 38 if they are employed by the county for the minimum 20 years.

No one can blame employees for this, but the county commissioners who created the benefit obviously didn’t see the burden this would cause when employees started to retire.

That’s why the current group of commissioners has a responsibility to correct this well-intentioned but onerous policy.

We believe that retirement health insurance benefits for future employees cannot continue. With the current trend, taxpayers will foot a bill in a few years of more than $1 million for these benefits.

In a time when local government must do more with less and property owners are continually required to contribute increased amounts of their income, long-term obligations for line items like lifetime health insurance cannot be afforded.