CalPERS

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CalPERS Long-Term Care: What Happens Tomorrow?

Byuclafaculty

Although CalPERS doesn’t run the UC retirement plan, at one point CalPERS offered long-term care insurance to UC employees.  It seemed to some folks to be a good idea at the time and they took out policies.  Long-term care policies can be bought from commercial carriers.  The problem is that you have to trust that these carriers will do right by you many years in the future when you may not be in the best condition to assert your rights.  It appeared, however, that having CalPERS – a public entity – providing the policies might be a solution.  Sadly, there…

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The Rewards of Good Behavior (and the penalties for the reverse)

Byuclafaculty

With a possible pension initiative coming to the ballot, it would be nice if public pension plans stayed on Good Behavior.  Alas: Federal investigators are looking into allegations that CalPERS violated insider trading laws this year when it purchased $26.6 million in restricted stock and then decided it didn’t need to reverse the trades when they were discovered. Two sources with knowledge of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s inquiry say on condition of anonymity that it involves stock purchases that the nation’s largest public pension fund made in March, including nearly $24 million in global financial firm JPMorgan Chase & Co….

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Core Competencies for Regents?

Byuclafaculty

Yours truly noted with interest this item from the State Worker blog of the Sacramento Bee: CalPERS’ governing board aims to up its collective understanding of everything from financial statements to financial markets with a new set of “core competencies” that will help shape education and training. The policy, which the board is imposing on itself, also requires board members to have familiarity with topics ranging from health care and pension plans to board governance and communication…  Full story at http://www.sacbee.com/2013/12/05/5974549/calpers-sets-knowledge-standards.html Now if the Regents were to adopt such a policy, what would their core competencies be?  Pension funding?  Capital…

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Let’s Start With This Idea on the Pension Initiative: One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Byuclafaculty

Don’t buy it. Editorial: The pension (and retiree health) initiative on which we have been reporting on this blog sweeps in UC for no particular reason.  Yet all the propaganda concerning it so far deals with mayors and cities.  UC has no mayor and isn’t a city. Were the Regents consulted by initiative proponents?  Was anyone at UCOP consulted?  Anyone at UC at all?  Yours truly sincerely doubts it.  Did anyone in the group pushing the initiative look at such issues as faculty recruitment, compensation, or any other UC issue?  Did they look at the issue of the constitutional autonomy…

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The CalPERS Long-Term Care Affair

Byuclafaculty

We have noted in earlier posts that although UC employees are not covered by CalPERS, at one point in the past, they were offered the “opportunity” to buy long-term care insurance through CalPERS.  But then CalPERS began jacking up the cost and, for those who protested, offering inferior alternative policies. CalPERS position is that it didn’t deliberately lowball the initial premiums but instead just underestimated what the costs would be.  But some subscribers disagree and now there is a lawsuit. From the Sacramento Bee: CalPERS was sued Tuesday over the big rate hikes it imposed on its long-term care insurance…

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Does everything have to be seen?

Byuclafaculty

From time to time on this blog, we have pointed to the issue of privacy and potential ID theft posed by the practice of certain newspapers posting public employee and pensions by name.  While courts have seemed to see the handing over of raw payroll data as a required public disclosure, we have noted that whatever purposes such posting has – ostensibly “good government” – could be accomplished using job titles without names, statistical distributions, etc. It may seem at this point that nothing more could be said or done about the impact on UC.  Note that private universities face…

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Hearing CalPERS Rate Hike for Long-Term Care Insurance

Byuclafaculty

San Francisco’s Poor House As prior blog posts have noted, although UC is not under CalPERS, UC employees – because they were state employees – were invited to enroll in CalPERS’ long-term care insurance plan.  Such plans ostensibly protect enrollees against potential catastrophic expenses that can be entailed in major health crises.  Those who did enroll now find themselves facing large rate hikes or accepting an alternative less generous plan.  Many who enrolled did so assuming that CalPERS would protect them from such hikes.  Yours truly has encountered a number of folks who now find themselves in this predicament.  CalPERS…

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Hiking

Byuclafaculty

Earlier blog posts have noted that CalPERS‘ premiums for long-term care are going nowhere but up.  Another rate hike is being announced with an option instead to move to a lesser-value plan. UC employees and faculty are normally not covered by CalPERS’ pension and health care plans.  However, as state workers, they were offered the chance to enroll in CalPERS’ long-term care program when CalPERS got into that business.  Unfortunately, there was no guarantee concerning what the premiums would be over time.  From the Sacramento Bee‘s State Worker blog: The California Public Employees’ Retirement System today is mailing some 150,000…

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Indirect Flattery for UCRP from CalPERS

Byuclafaculty

According to a Bloomberg report, CalPERS’ chief actuary is recommending that his fund follow the practice that is currently in place (assuming the Regents continue it) for the UC pension fund.  At present, CalPERS follows a fifteen year smoothing period, extremely long, and doesn’t get to 100% funding in thirty years.  UC has five years smoothing and a plan for 100% over 30 years. …Alan Milligan, (CalPERS’)… chief actuary, recommends that the biggest U.S. pension stop spreading out losses and gains over 15 years and instead set rates based on how much is needed to reach 100 percent funding within…

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Long-Term Care Cop Out?

Byuclafaculty

Back on Feb. 20, we posted a piece on a big CalPERS hike for long-term care insurance.  We noted that although UC is not covered by CalPERS, as state employees, UC employees could buy – some might say were encouraged to buy – long-term care insurance through CalPERS.  Now premiums are climbing rapidly and some may drop the insurance (losing what they paid) due to the price hikes. From the Sacramento Bee State Worker Blog: Longtime policyholders say that when CalPERS was pushing the insurance in the 1990s, it guaranteed their rates wouldn’t rise. That gave younger adults – a…