Word: plan
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...benefits alone, government entities spent 72.8% more per employee than private-sector employers last year. That's partly because government workers are more likely to participate in richer retirement and health plans. More than four in five government employees participates in a retirement plan, compared with just half of private-sector employees. And three quarters of government workers get health insurance benefits, compared with just half of private-sector employees...
...sector," says Blaine Bos, a consultant for Mercer based in Minneapolis, Minn. Instead, government agencies have to battle bit by bit for benefit trims that employees can collectively counter by marshaling great passion. In 2005 when California's Governor Schwarzenegger tried to radically reform the state's expensive pension plan, he met a firestorm of protest from unions, and ultimately backed down...
...many city managers, it's easier to justify tacking a few fresh dollars onto locals' real estate tax bills than to try and slash the padding on a fireman's health insurance plan. City workers may pay 10% to 20% of a health plan's cost, compared with 30% in the private sector, but you win few local fans when you boost the burden on a teacher or policeman to prettify the municipal bottom line...
Many city workers are eligible for legacy health plans that aren't available to private-sector workers in any but the ritziest of jobs. Some such plans, for instance, offer 100% coverage for basic surgeries with little if any co-pay, whereas private plans may require a $250 to $500 co-pay per surgery. In Massachusetts, for example, many local government employees enjoy benefit plans that have long since been phased out for private employees, who have seen plan standards tighten consistently in recent years. Increasingly, private sector employees across the country end up in euphemistically dubbed "consumer-directed health...
...Keeping Gates as the Defense Secretary would allow him to continue his push to focus the military's efforts on insurgencies of the type it's facing in Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than on the hypothetical conventional wars for which it would prefer to plan - and for which it continues to order up costly weapons. (But continuity would also keep Pentagon spending, already at World War II levels, climbing into the stratosphere on autopilot...