Nurses are beefing about having to pay $1,000 a year for health insurance after retirement? Welcome to the real world, public employees. I am 66 and I pay roughly $2,400 for Medicare and my Medicare Advantage plan. So, sorry, your cries of horror are falling on deaf ears here.

It's hard for me to believe...and I completely refuse to accept...this level of tone deafness from supposedly educated people. The Governor's proposal does not represent a trashing of the health benefits available to these nurses; it's a rational trimming that bring a way out of line benefit back to some level of reality. If you want to work for the public, then work for the public. If you want private sector level benefits...and risks, then work for the private sector. I find it hard to believe that nurses would find as rich a set of benefits in the private sector, even with this trimming.

Public employees are in the "real world." They work jobs to pay their bills like everyone else, often making less than they would in the private sector. The fact that Tuscarora is paying into public safety net programs is completely irrelevant to this conversation. Public employees have every right to fight for their benefits, as do private sector employees; the whole "stop complaining and join me in my misery" schtick stopped being cute around the time that private corporations started using 401k's to replace actual retirement pensions rather than to supplement them -- i.e., within the last couple decades. It'd be nice if Tuscarora had spent more of those 66 years fighting to get those better benefits rather than ending up old, deaf, and crotchety. It's hard to trust someone demanding that everyone end up equally miserable.

It is unfortunate the the public misunderstands the pension and health care insurance being provided to its workforce, which only causes many of them to vent about how some people seem to have it made.

Massachusetts, like some other states, offers its employees a public pension rather than do what the private sector does, which is to match its employee's FICA contributions for their eventual Social Security payments.  Instead, state employees contribute to their own pension, which the state is supposed to match.  Unlike private employers who would face severe civil and criminal penalties if they failed to match their employee's contributions to Social Security, Massachusetts for many years has been putting off its contributions until they now amount to the billions of dollars.  Now, some legislators (and many members of the public) grouse that we can't afford these payments.  It would be like a private employer not paying their matching Social Security taxes and spending the money elsewhere complaining that they shouldn't have to pay now that they can't afford it.

As for retiring at age 50, while it is true that state employees used to be able to retire at age 50 with only 20 years of service or to retire at age 55 with only ten years of service, it was never with a full pension.  Someone with ten years of service retiring at the age of 55 with ten years of service could enjoy a pension of 15%.  Not exactly a pension to live on for the rest of their lives.  Likewise, someone retiring at the age of 50 with 20 years of service could enjoy a pension of 20%.  Again, not what the public thinks of as a hack living off the public for the rest of their lives.  These pensions were intended for those who were leaving state service to return to the private sector and who not contributing to Social Security for those years of state service or those who were entering state service after years in the private sector and would no longer be contributing to their Social Security, both examples resulting in lowered Social Security when they eventually retired.

And for state workers with both private employment and state employment when they retired, their Social Security retirement benefits are slashed when they retire.  Despite earning Social Security benefits, they are reduced because of their state pension, despite having paid into the federal system.

Before I forget it, state employees hired after July 1, 1996, must pay nine percent of their salary, almost 50% more than workers in the private sector pay for Social Security.

So while I do not expect to be living in poverty when I eventually retire (no sooner than my 66th birthday), neither will I be living high off the hog at the taxpayer's expense.  Instead, I will receive a pension from a pension system into which I, as an employee, and you and I, as taxpayers, have contributed that is in lieu of the federal system of Social Security.

I won't begrudge what you have earned after a lifetime of paying into Social Security.  Please don't begrudge what I have earned after a lifetime of paying into the state pension system.