Health care costs for the public sector are going to keep rising and it likely will mean service cuts, tax increases, layoffs and labor disagreements at both the local and state levels of government. The micro read on this is that the various government entities have been too generous — which is way too simple an analysis. The reality is that we should be discussing this as part of the national health care debate and not focusing so narrowly on public employees and turnining to the rhetoric of resentment (i.e., “I work in the private sector and get shafted on health care, so public employees should get shafted, too). Fix health care and health insurance and this should take care of itself.
Hank Kalet 
We need one payer health care NOW but obviously that will never happen. We will be lucky if we even get a public option. The insurance lobby has bought off too many Democrats and virtually all of the GOP. Some Democrats are proposing some crap nonsense called co-ops. The public option, which is already a compromise, is under assault. I fear we will end up with a half-a$$ed, crappy, truncated, watered down so-called public option and we could be stuck with it for decades. It will not improve efficiency or lower costs over the long term. The drug and the insurance companies are just too powerful, they have too much money to throw around and they can buy politicians by the truck load.All the other advanced, free, democratic capitalistic countries have some form of genuine universal health care and here we are still debating how many insurance companies we can fit on the head of a pin. GEEEEEBUS!!!!