Health Care for Life: Will teachers' post-retirement benefits break the bank?

Education Next: At a recent school board meeting in Los Angeles, the budget director put up a slide with a dire warning. Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the country, is on pace to spend more than half of its annual budget on retirement and health-care costs by the year 2031. By then, it is projected to spend 22.4 percent of its budget on pensions and 28.4 on health-care benefits for current and former workers.

The cost of health care is rising rapidly in all parts of our economy, but the pressures in the public sector, and particularly in public education, are different.

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