Providing retiree health care benefits and covering retirement health care expenses in an environment of escalating health care costs are front-burner issues for the higher education community. The availability and affordability of retiree health benefits will have a direct impact on the retirement patterns and the retirement income security of higher education faculty and staff.
The TIAA-CREF Institute has conducted and sponsored research over the past several years on retiree health care issues. This collection brings together that research in a single location. It includes reports that explore, among other issues, the implications of retiree health expenditures for individual workers, the trends in retiree health benefits provided by colleges and universities and the options currently available for pre-funding retiree health expenditures (as well as the drawbacks of those options.)
Key questions addressed in this collection of reports include:
- In the face of rising costs, will higher education follow the trend of the for-profit sector by slicing benefit levels and restricting eligibility?
- Will new accounting standards introduce to higher education the same pressures on retiree health benefits as in the for-profit sector?
- How can higher education respond to its unique challenges in providing retiree health benefits?
- With the burden of health care costs increasingly on the individual, how can workers plan ahead?
