Employers want flexibility to manage their
finances—including the power to terminate plans if
the expense becomes financially crippling; employees want
security—they want to receive benefits they have
been promised. —Charles C. Morgan, Prudential Asset
Management Co.
Companies have found they are no longer in the business
of merely making widgets. They are in the business of
making widgets and also in the (health) insurance
business. —William Reimert, Milliman & Robertson
I think we are heading toward a new definition of
necessary benefits, or a core set of benefits, that
employers are going to be willing to provide, and those are
the predictable ones, the capped ones, and more
manageable for them. —Meredith Miller, AFL-CIO
FAS 106 put truth in packaging, but perhaps an unintended
effect has been the taking away of benefits that might
not otherwise have occurred at the same point in time. —David Skovron, Kwasha Lipton
The financial impacts associated with changes in retiree
health benefits are likely to be quite small. The
increased annual expense to retirees, resulting from
retiree health benefits cost-shifting, will average only
$257 a year. —Christopher J. Ruhm, University of
North Carolina at Greensboro
Market analysts generally had figured a company's retiree
health care liabilities at 10 to 15 times its current
annual pay-as-you-go expense. Announcements to date,
however, show this number seems to be misleadingly low.
The true figure could be 20 times or more. —Douglas
J. Elliott, J.P. Morgan
It would be real difficult, real difficult for any
prefunding tax incentives to pass in the next couple of
years. A lot of folks would feel that if we're going to
spend the precious federal dollars that we have, it's
better off trying to increase access to the people who do
not have health care coverage, and/or trying to reduce
the overall cost of the system. —Rick Grafmeyer,
Senate Finance Committee
Retiree health coverage purchased, at the employer's
discretion, with prefunded amounts attributable to
employer contributions under a VEBA or a 401 (h) retiree
health account qualifies as employer-provided coverage
under (IRC) section 106. —Harry J. Conaway, William
M. Mercer, Inc.
There is a fundamental problem with how we provide health
care to retirees in this country, which warrants systemic
reform. Worrying about funding takes us off on the wrong
track. —David Hirschland, United Auto Workers of
America
