From a little table we can gain a lot of insight if.........if we understand what else that same chart really says to us!

From John Curry, August 25, 2009
Here's the up-to-date chart for hc insurance premiums for 2010 for those retirees who are yet to reach the magic age of 65 (Medicare eligibility) [click image to enlarge]:

This chart has a lot of information but....I want you to pay careful attention to just one small part of this chart. That is, the next to last row entitled, "Spouse." Now, a little more "narrowing down" to the first column after Spouse...this number is $924 and is in the column marked "Medical Mutual Plus 2010." So...what am I driving at, you ask? Well, look at it this way.....$924 is the total cost to STRS to insure one pre-65 year old person (spouse in this case) with an 80/20 PPO health insurance program for just one month. This is the SAME price it costs STRS to insure the retiree him/herself.... EXCEPT STRS pays a subsidy for the Retiree so that the 30 year retiree pays $210 per month (as STRS pays [subsidizes] the other $714 monthly for the retiree's insurance premium.)

You say, I knew that.....so what? Well...it's like a close friend said after reading all the exchanges of angry and some not-so-angry emails pertaining to how much COLA to cut or not to cut or....the 88% rule and the 1/2% per year increased contributions along with the employer contributions, ad infinitum....it gets frustrating, doesn't it? My friend, a part time college instructor and also one who is known to be able to see the forest for the trees, basically said this:

Many of these actives and retirees both would have few or no disagreements related to COLAS, high healthcare premiums or employer contribution worries if they all would just understand and demand true healthcare reform from their Senators and House Members who represent them and demand that the profiteering by the greed of hc insurance industry CEO's and other high ranking officers in said insurance companies come to a screeching halt so that those monies can be used for treatment of Americans rather than be used for second and third holiday homes and multi million dollar stock options for those in charge. Yeah, I know, that was a run-on sentence but we are now paying for greed induced run-on profiteering that would fill up a whole lot more pages than this writer intends to fill, wouldn't they? And, without that profiteering [at your expense] we sure could enjoy affordable healthcare coverage, we sure could afford a much more comfortable retirement, couldn't we? A retirement where many of us wouldn't have to go out and work at a job (or second job) just to be able to afford to pay for healthcare in our supposed retirement!

So, instead of attacking the cancer of greed and profiteering by health insurance companies, we educators (as well as many other Americans) will continue pointing our fingers at the symptoms of the disease rather than the disease itself. We also need to be pointing our fingers at our Congressional representatives and demanding real health care reform....are we...... or are we happy with the status quo? Far too many educators are in the latter category, aren't they? I'm sure the healthcare insurance executives are sitting back right now and laughing their hind ends off watching the displaced blame fires popping up all over the country in a well-designed smokescreen that was initiated by those very same health insurance executives....and their lobbyists on K-Street. Worse yet, I see some of my fellow retirees actually fighting against healthcare reform and (unknowingly) furnishing sympathy to the unchecked greed of the insurance cartel who is, at the same time, screwing them right into the ground. Go figure! P.T. Barnum had a saying about people like this...."There's one born every minute."

John