MARY Alplanalp worked 19 years for the San Diego County welfare department, spurning higher-paying jobs to stay in a position where the most she ever made was $8 an hour. It was worth the low wage, she figured, because of a benefit package that promised she would never be destitute in old age.
Or so she thought.
At age 83 with a long list of debilitating ailments, no family and a monthly pension of just $1,000, Alplanalp says the only thing between her and homelessness is the lifetime health insurance she secured on the job to cover what Medicare does not.
Now county officials are threatening to take it away.
"If I don't have my medication, I will hallucinate," said Alplanalp, who suffers from mental health problems along with colon cancer and diabetes. "Where has compassion gone?"
Alplanalp's worries are shared by thousands of current and former public employees in California, as officials at every level of government confront the staggering cost of providing healthcare to their retirees. For years, public employers have promised workers lifetime benefits, but little money has been put aside to cover the bill. Now, new accounting rules have required government employers to calculate and disclose the potential liability.
The tab is enormous.
Some examples:
* Over the next three decades, the Los Angeles Unified School District will have to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars a year for retiree health benefits. It has yet to set funds aside to cover the bill. "These costs are just crushing," said district general counsel Kevin Reed.
* The state government is on the hook for payouts averaging well over a billion dollars a year -- and possibly billions more -- for retiree healthcare over the next three decades.
* Contra Costa County's retiree healthcare tab is on track to grow larger than the value of all its assets by 2012, according to a government report, which would make the county at that point "technically insolvent."
* In just four years ending in fiscal 2004-05, the cost of providing healthcare to the average Los Angeles County retiree doubled. By 2011, government retiree healthcare costs statewide are projected to be nearly triple those in 2004.
* A grand jury in Marin County, which surveyed dozens of public institutions for its March report "Retiree Health Care Costs: I Think I'm Gonna Be Sick" warned that some local governments may soon realize "it is impossible to meet their obligations. Bankruptcies or a 'death by a thousand cuts' in services are real possibilities."
