Tag Archives: Cities

Will ACA Bail Out Unfunded Municipal Retiree Health Benefits?

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Detroit and Chicago have announced plans to offload their unfunded retiree health plans onto the Affordable Care Act exchanges. The Detroit announcement predated the July 18th filing for bankruptcy protection. These cities believe they will save tens if not hundreds of millions in expenditures annually if they are successful in their intentions.

 

 

For the 61 largest cities in the nation, Pew Research has found that retiree health obligations under current contract or policies are only 6 percent funded.  In Detroit that number is close to zero.

 

While the Affordable Care Act requires employers with 50 or more employees to offer health insurance to employees or pay a fine (presumably municipalities are covered, but it does not matter, they almost all provide insurance anyway), the Act does not cover retirees. So cities-and perhaps states-might look at what Detroit is planning and decide to follow suit. Many private companies and some governments stopped paying for retiree health care years ago.

 

There are two levels of the issue.  Retirees and employees who have worked under contracts promising the health benefits in their retirement presumably cannot willy-nilly be deprived of those benefits by a unilateral cancelation by the employer. Folks already retired would have little incentive to make large concessions since they cannot lose their jobs if they refuse.  Eliminating future retiree health benefits for current employees would require contract renegotiation.  Therefore, for these groups, it would appear bankruptcy of the city might be the only way to have the promised benefits nullified.  Health benefits for retirees and current employees who have no protection of a contract might be offloaded with or without filing bankruptcy.

 

For new employees who will be on labor contracts, the city could negotiate to eliminate retiree health benefits. And for non-contract employees it could simply adopt a no retiree health benefit policy. There are local Pennsylvania examples.  In the City of Pittsburgh, police and fire personnel hired after 2005 do not get retiree health care the way employees working in those departments and employed prior to 2005 do.  The Port Authority’s largest union (its 2008 contract called for the union and the Authority to “jointly issue a statement with regard to their support for national health care”) has language in its 2012 contract stating that employees hired on or after July 1, 2012 would be eligible for three years of retiree medical coverage, as opposed to previous stipulations that allowed coverage until Medicare eligibility if the employee had 25 years of service or had reached age 55 and had ten years of service.

 

Government employee pension benefits are sacrosanct in many states to the point of being constitutionally protected.  That is certainly the case in Pennsylvania and Michigan.  Whether Federal bankruptcy judges will use Federal law to set aside state constitutions in the pension issue remains to be seen. At the same time, health benefits for retirees could be more easily dealt with in bankruptcy.  But, for cities looking to dump retiree health benefits for employees and retirees working under contracts containing such provisions, get ready for lawsuits and labor unrest. Bankruptcy or threats of massive layoffs will almost certainly be needed to get meaningful results.

While the offloading of retiree health care onto the exchanges might be appealing to many hard pressed cities and towns, it might be more complicated than they think. On the other hand, if they have a strong enough case to file bankruptcy, retiree health costs might be the trigger to file.

 

In the larger picture, if cities are able to offload their retiree health promises to the Affordable Care Act, then US taxpayers will get a big share of the tab.  Watching 58 year olds enjoy retirement from Detroit or Chicago city jobs and get Federally-subsidized health care until they reach 65 might not sit well with 60 year olds in the private sector who have no retiree health care until eligible for Medicare and have to keep working and keep paying taxes to subsidize the Detroit retiree’s health benefits. Further, if this strategy turns into a flood of unexpected exchange participants, what happens to the projected expenditures?  Undoubtedly, they will be off. And what if a bunch of private sector companies follow suit?

 

If a few large municipalities such as Detroit and Chicago are successful in reducing their expenses substantially by pushing retirees into the exchanges, there will undoubtedly be a flood of other municipalities around the country rushing to do the same. Moreover, there could be a number of school districts that could benefit from dumping retiree health benefits.  In short, taxpayers might find themselves on the hook for funding much more health care than Affordable Care Act drafters imagined. 

 

This is another unforeseen consequence of a health care law with seemingly unlimited ramifications and complications.

High Taxed Cities Shows One Surprise

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The website 24/7 Wall Street took a report done by Washington, DC’s Office of Revenue Analysis that examined the property, sales, and automobile taxes paid by a hypothetical family of three earning one of two levels of income ($25,000 or $150,000) to see which city had the highest tax burden. To be clear, the data does not look at all cities, only the largest city in each state. So for Pennsylvania only the City of Philadelphia is examined (it ranked second highest for both hypothetical earning levels, taking 13.3% of income for the higher earning family, 18% for the lower earning family).

The highest taxes city was Bridgeport, CT. Its high property taxes add to that distinction, and New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Baltimore fill out the top ten. One surprise would be the city that came in fourth, taking $18k from a family earing $150k and $3.5k for the $25k earning family, was Louisville. Readers of our work will recall that Louisville was the last major city to merge city and county functions (in January of 2003), and was the shining star of merger advocates in the southwestern Pennsylvania region (they ignored the example of Philly, which has been a merged government for a very long time) and many officials from Louisville took junkets here to trumpet their successes. A September 2003 article noted "Of particular interest to Pittsburgh, the Louisville merger allows the metro city to be more efficient…Instead of two information-technology departments, there is one. Instead of two human resources offices, there’s one. By eliminating redundant offices, the city will eventually save money not only on personnel, but also on rent, once leases on county office buildings expire." Though not sold as a money saver and rather as an image booster, one would expect that there would be some tax savings through consolidation.

Looking at the statistical section of two of Louisville’s financial audits-the 2003 one and the 2012 one-gives a perspective on the ten years leading up to the merger and the ten years since shows the rates levied on real and personal property by the City of Louisville (now known as the "urban services district") and Jefferson County (now known as the "metro government") shows that from 1993 to 2002 combined real and personal property tax rates fell 7% from 1.325 to 1.236. From 2003 through 2012, the combined rates on those taxes still fell, but by 0.8%, a rate much lower than pre-merger. But who’s in the position to complain about a tax cut of any shape or form these days? Especially when one notes that the combined real, inventory, and personal rates of the long consolidated school district (not part of the 2003 merger) went up 18% since the merger?

Does PA Have any Cities on a Hill?

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Is there a conservative urban agenda? If so, what does it look like? Even more to the point, are there any cities in Pennsylvania exhibiting the traits if such an agenda existed?

A recent opinion piece in the Washington Examiner outlined "a conservative agenda for cities". Most of the components of the urban agenda of the last half of the 20th century did not work, as the author argued, or "Cleveland, Buffalo, and Detroit would all be booming".

The components ofa new strategy would include:

  • Crime-prevention oriented policing based on the New York City experience
  • Reform of public sector pensions toward 401k type plans and away from defined benefit plans
  • Private financing of infrastructure
  • A continued push for competition in public education from charter schools

One could see that there might be pieces of this strategy in some cities around the Commonwealth, but there likely is not any one municipality that encompasses them all. Of course, moving toward some of the reforms would have to come from Harrisburg, which could add revisions of binding arbitration and outlawing public sector strikes to help cultivate this agenda.