Heather Gillers

speaker

548 appearances 11 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2018 last heard Oct 2021

Heather Gillers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

WSJ Your Money Briefing · Some States Have Stopped Paying Retiree Health Benefits · 2 May 2019 podcast

So for this story, I talked to an assistant superintendent of corrections in North Carolina who currently has matched

a 30% vacancy rate for correction officers in the facility where he works and is very concerned that when North Carolina stops offering retiree health benefits to state workers in 2021, he will have an even harder time recruiting people to be corrections officers. matched

That's right. matched

So Kansas, whereas North Carolina said, matched

if you're hired after 2021, you can't have this benefit. matched

In other words, North Carolina is going to stop offering this benefit for new employees hired after a certain date. matched

Kansas more or less ended it immediately for everyone, including people who are already retired. matched

You know, people who may have factored this into the mathematical calculations they made when they made the decision to retire. matched

So what's happening in Kansas is they haven't eliminated the plan altogether. matched

But what they've said is we, the state of Kansas, are not going to pay a penny for retirees to be on this plan. matched

So if you retirees want to keep receiving health care through the state of Kansas, you need to pay the entire premium, which could be as much as $1,000. matched

After that decision was made, matched

made three quarters of the 2,000 retirees who were on the state health plan left. matched

So the number of retirees on the state health plan dropped in the space of one or two years from 2,000 to 500. matched

This decision that Kansas made was quite effective in reducing the state's liability. matched

In 2016, matched

Kansas had a little more than $6 million less than what it needed to pay for health care benefits for retirees. matched

Now that gap is only about $500,000. matched

One of the sort of behind-the-scenes nudges that states have been getting in terms of coming to terms with these liabilities is coming from something called the Governmental Accounting Standards Board. matched

And that's a body that sets the guidelines that matched

Showing 461–480 of 548 · page 24 of 28