Southern Fairfield County Retired Teacher Association SFCRTA - Southern Fairfield County Retired Teacher Association

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Please read this letter to see how we represent you

To Fellow Retirees:

I thoroughly love being retired; however, it is not without its challenges.

What I love most is time:  to get up a little later in the morning, to travel off-peak, to do errands off-peak, to design a day as I think best, to have other days to do all the things I used to do on Saturday and/or Sunday.

However, there are things that I find frustrating:

On an already reduced salary, I have to fund almost 100% of my health insurance premiums. As is the case in manyConnecticutteaching districts, the teachers’ contract in my town had no language about retiree insurance benefits. Except for the $110 per month distributed byConnecticuttoGreenwich(my last employer), all of an increasingly more expensive insurance plan is my responsibility.  Where does that $110 come from? It comes from the HIPA (Health Insurance Premium Account), which stems from the required additional 1% and then 1.25% that I paid during my active years, and which current active teachers continue to put in.  Oh, yes, the State ofConnecticutcontributes $34 per month of that $110, although they had to “borrow” it from the HIPA account for the last two years. No word on repayment that I know of.  When I tell people outside of education that I pay for my own health insurance, I find their reactions range from incredulity to being flabbergasted.  I retired at age 57, so I have a few more years to go before I can (hopefully) get on Medicare.  Try telling someone that some teachers don’t even qualify for Medicare because we don’t pay in to Social Security, and we don’t have a spouse, or our spouse did not pay into Social Security either. Unless we were hired after 1986 and paid into Medicare, some of us will be subject to funding our own insurance at the premium paid by our last employer (or paying a much higher premium to Medicare) over the rest of our life.

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