Fund Our Teachers!

I'm sure we all have that one favorite teacher who we may have friended on Facebook to keep in touch with. One of the few last things we would want to hear is that our state is running out of money to fund that teacher’s health care insurance, not only for them but for their loved ones. As I sit here after reading Jim Malewitz's article, Health Insurance Fund for Retired Teachers Drying Up, I begin to wonder how we ran out of money so fast. After all the years they spent contributing to our communities and making an impact on students' lives, lawmakers have yet to come up with a plan to prevent this situation from happening. When this program was first created, it was supposed to be expanded upon to maintain a sustainable program. Now, here we are 29 years later with the same, not expanded upon program, trying to figure out how we’re going to fix this. Apparently “the retirement system has just two main tools to keep the fund solvent: hiking premiums for the fund’s more than 233,000 retirees and their dependents, or cutting their benefits”. Why didn’t we take any action sooner?