The California Drug Price Relief Act, as it was dubbed, “would impose price controls on prescription drug purchases funded — directly and indirectly — by the state,” as California Healthline reported. “The proposal would mandate that the state pay the same as or less than the rates paid by the Department of Veterans Affairs for prescription drug purchases. California currently pays billions of dollars for prescription drugs — both directly, such as for prison health care, and indirectly, such as for Medi-Cal and CalPERS managed care plans.”

Pharmaceutical companies swiftly rallied in opposition to the would-be law, reaching into their pockets to fund messaging around what they call its misleading pitch to voters. “It will increase the prices of prescription drugs sold to veterans and many California consumers and will reduce the number of drug choices available to Californians all while costing taxpayers millions more in state bureaucracy and lawsuits because it will be virtually impossible to implement,” said Kathy Fairbanks, spokeswoman for the campaign, according to the Sacramento Bee.

Spiraling expenses

The Golden State has not been alone in struggling with drug affordability. Nationwide, over the past decade, even the cost of common drugs has outpaced the rate of inflation. “Prices rose faster than inflation for 22 percent of top generic drugs reviewed between 2005 and 2014,” Modern Healthcare reported, citing a recently released report authored by by the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services. “Had those generic drugs been subject to the same requirement that branded drugs face — where manufacturers pay additional rebates to Medicaid when the price of a drug increases faster than inflation — Medicaid would have pulled in $1.4 billion in rebates for the top 200 generic drugs.” CalPERS drug expenses would be included in the rates the CDPRA would try to push down.

OIG had issued its report in response to an inquiry by Congress into the way rising drug prices had affected budgeting in both Medicaid and Medicare, Modern Healthcare noted. But OIG held off on drawing any policy conclusions, “noting that that the two-year budget deal recently passed by Congress would extend the rebates to generics starting in 2017,” according to Modern Healthcare. “In a previous, similar report, OIG had recommended CMS consider seeking legislative authority to broaden the rebate program.”

Perverse incentives

Despite the populist appeal of taking on the drug companies, critics have cautioned that some of the same incentives the CDPRA would seek to punish would simply flourish in another, harder-to-tackle form. “The initiative would create an incentive for drug companies to hike the prices they charge the VA given it would have a ripple effect. State officials told Southern California Public Radio that they even don’t always know what the VA pays for drugs,” noted Steven Greenhut at U-T San Diego.

Echoing that concern, Jeff McCombs, a health economist with the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics at USC, told Southern California Public Radio “that Congress attempted a similar strategy with a 1991 law that required drug companies to give Medicaid the same deep discounts they gave other big customers. But rather than forcing down Medicaid drug prices, the law spurred pharmaceutical companies to raise prices for their other big customers, including the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

Legal, illegal and quasi-legal pot farms all faced an extraordinary risk from the blazes. And those which were wiped out were not expected to return. In a report, the International Business Times noted, “because their crops are still illegal federally, these farmers can’t take advantage of wildfire safety net programs offered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to other farmers and ranchers, and very few of these growers likely had marijuana insurance policies that have only recently been developed.”

That augured a sea change in the way marijuana is cultivated and sold in California, whose voters are expected to give strong consideration to legalizing recreational use of the product on the 2016 ballot.

Crops and consequences

Timothy Anderson, purchasing manager at Harborside Health Center, captured the problem in a series of interviews with local and national media. This August, he told NBC Bay Area that “about a quarter” of Harborside’s pot “comes from growers near Clear Lake, and the smoke from the fire is damaging another growers’ crops. He expects the drop in supply will raise prices around the Bay Area, for dispensaries who buy from outdoor grows.”

The risks posed to marijuana farmers by fire exceed those of other crops. “Unlike an apple or tomato, you can’t wash a cannabis plant off. The sticky resin is going to grab onto any environmental grit or grime from the air,” Anderson told NBC.

This month, amid the aftermath, he told the IB Times that the fires and the upcoming vote would likely combine to remake the market, to the advantage of larger corporate interests that traditional medical marijuana growers and supporters often fear will squeeze them out of business anyway. “Someone whose farm burns down or loses his crop and he doesn’t come back for a year, by that point our business relationship could have changed,” he told the paper. “Any time someone steps out of the market, you find someone else to replace him with.”

With statewide regulations in place, the IB Times observed, “now is not a good time for established cannabis growers to lose their foothold in the developing industry. ‘If you don’t have a crop in these crucial years,'” asked Anderson, “‘where are you a year or two down the road when the whole market is ready to shift?'”

Community costs

The loss of marijuana farms promised to worsen the fires’ adverse impact on the struggling rural counties it hurt most. “In Amador and Calaveras counties, the Butte fire has destroyed 475 homes, killed two people and burned through nearly 71,000 acres,” the Los Angeles Times reported. With the lucrative marijuana business largely shut down, and growers poised at best to restart their farms elsewhere, the economic impact could be pronounced.

In an effort to blunt the impact on medical marijuana smokers, who were doubly hit by the fires, two companies have offered not to charge for their products. “Care By Design and AbsoluteXtracts,” the Times noted, “are offering free products at five dispensaries in San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Sebastopol and Lake County.”

“Patients eligible for the free products must have a prescription and home addresses in Cobb, Kelseyville, Middletown or Hidden Valley Lake — among the hardest hit communities over the last three weeks, where the Valley fire has ripped through 118 square miles, destroyed nearly 2,000 homes and claimed four lives.”

In the meanwhile, the shift away from traditional rural marijuana farming could exacerbate a worrisome trend closer to urban centers: large-scale residential grow houses. Rialto firefighters recently discovered that a renter was stealing electricity to help raise some 200 plants in a home he didn’t occupy, bypassing the meter to avoid detection, according to NBC Los Angeles.

Democratic Assemblymen Evan Low of Campbell and Richard Bloom of Santa Monica have proposed a 12-fold increase in the fee charged to obtain a title and summary for a proposed ballot measure. Low introduced the measure after a public uproar over an outrageous ballot measure that proposed a death penalty for gays and lesbians.

“We live in California, the cradle of direct democracy, but we also need a threshold for reasonableness,” Low said in a press release. “Amending laws and making statewide policy is not something that should be taken lightly.”

The bill, which passed the State Assembly in May on 46-28 vote, is now quickly moving its way through the State Senate.

Sodomite Suppression Act spawns fee hike

Since 1943, any Californian with $200 has been able to obtain the necessary paperwork to begin collecting signatures to put their proposal on the ballot. The reasonable filing fee has allowed average citizens and grassroots organizations to shape the political debate. Often times, the text, title and summary are enough to generate free publicity for an idea, including outrageous and blatantly unconstitutional measures.

Earlier this year, Orange County attorney Matthew McLaughlin paid his $200 filing fee and submitted the necessary paperwork to circulate “The Sodomite Suppression Act.” The proposed initiative would have “put to death by bullets to the head” gays and lesbians as well as banned anyone “who espouses sodomistic propaganda” from holding public office, receiving government benefits or being employed by the state.

Low said that the anti-gay measure inspired his decision to introduce Assembly Bill 1100 to increase the filing fee.

“It’s disturbing to hear that a licensed member of the California State Bar is putting forward a measure that attacks lesbian and gay members in our community,” Low said in a March press release announcing the bill. “But Mr. McLaughlin’s immoral proposal is the just the latest – and most egregious – example of the need to further reform the initiative process.”

Anti-gay measure blocked, filing fee hike remains

Attorney General Kamala Harris refused to grant the measure a title and summary, and instead sought court approval to ignore the initiative. Earlier this week, California Superior Court Judge Raymond Cadei ruled in Harris’ favor, granting her the legal authority not to issue a title and summary.

With the court’s ruling to block the measure, one consumer advocacy group says that the filing fee hike is no longer needed.

“While we have reservations about how the court short-circuited the process, its decision made the bill irrelevant,” Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog, wrote in a letter to state lawmakers. “And, unlike the courts, AB 1100 won’t guarantee an end to similar initiatives. But it will stop legitimate citizen initiatives.”

That position was supported by the Los Angeles Times, which recently noted in an editorial that “the fee should not be used as a tool to make it harder to file undesirable initiatives.” Yet, despite the court’s ruling, Low is unwavering in his mission to pass a 12-fold increase in the filing fee.

“While the court’s ruling on this egregious initiative proposal is both legally and morally the right action to take, the events bring attention to the need to reform the initiative process,” he said.

Right, left oppose filing fee hike

Asm. Evan Low

Even before the court’s decision to block the anti-gay measure, groups on both sides of the aisle expressed concerns that a fee increase could limit the ability of average citizens to use the state’s tools of direct democracy.

Consumer Watchdog, one of the most vocal opponents to the filing fee hike, reviewed filing fees for more than two dozen states that have an initiative process. The overwhelming majority have no filing fee, with just five states charging a nominal fee. Currently, Mississippi has the highest filing fee in the country at $500.

“It’s outrageous that the state that birthed direct democracy would charge its citizens an initiative filing fee that is five times greater than the next highest state – Mississippi,” Consumer Watchdog argued in its opposition letter.

Opposition to AB1100 isn’t limited to Consumer Watchdog. Both the California Taxpayers Association and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association have formally opposed the bill.

The filing fee alone doesn’t put a measure on the ballot. The threshold for qualifying a ballot measure is 5 percent of the total votes cast in the previous gubernatorial election. As a result of California’s record low turnout in last November’s election, that threshold is at its lowest in three decades, but still requires 365,880 valid signatures.

In 2010, a similar proposal passed both houses of the Legislature before it was vetoed by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. “While well-funded special interest groups would have no problem paying the sharply increased fee, it will make it more difficult for citizen groups to qualify an initiative,” Schwarzenegger wrote in his veto message.

This year’s bill will be heard by the Senate Appropriations Committee on June 29.

As Judge Cadei wrote in his one-page ruling, the Sodomite Suppression Act – also known as the “Shoot The Gays Initiative” – is “patently unconstitutional on its face,” and any further filing action “would be inappropriate, waste public resources, generate unnecessary divisions among the public, and tend to mislead the electorate.”

Regarding the ruling, Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin said in a press release:

“Lest there was any doubt, a heinous California ballot initiative seeking to put gay people to death has been found unconstitutional. HRC thanks Attorney General Kamala Harris for her continued leadership in standing up for the rights and dignity of LGBT Californians, and Superior Court Judge Raymond Cadei for recognizing that this barbaric initiative has no place on a ballot in California or anywhere else.”

The act was initially filed in February by Orange County attorney Matt McLaughlin, and called sodomy an “abominable crime against nature” and “a monstrous evil.” McLaughlin proposed gay and lesbian “offenders” should “be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”

Tori Rector/flickr

In March, Attorney General Harris requested the state Superior Court to relieve her from the responsibility of creating a title and summary for the initiative. “This proposal not only threatens public safety, it is patently unconstitutional, utterly reprehensible, and has no place in a civil society,” she said in a prepared statement. “If the court does not grant this relief, my office will be forced to issue a title and summary for a proposal that seeks to legalize discrimination and vigilantism.”

Since the filing, two larger issues have worked themselves into the discussion of reforming the state ballot initiative process.

First, because it costs $200 to submit an initiative and begin the process of gathering 365,880 signatures to get the measure on the ballot, some believe the fee should be raised in order to prevent abuse of the system.

Assemblyman Evan Low, D-Campbell, said in a release, “While the court’s ruling on this egregious initiative proposal is both legally and morally the right action to take, the events bring attention to the need to reform the initiative process.” He and Assemblyman Richard Bloom, D-Santa Monica, introduced Assembly Bill 1100, which would increase the filing fee from $200 to $8,000. The legislation since then has been amended to increase the fee to $2,500, but critics worry a higher fee would prevent legitimate grass-roots petitioners from gaining traction without the help of well-off backers.

Second, some advocate that the state attorney general should be given the power “to kill a proposal that would conflict with superseding law” – such as murder. Technically, any proposed initiative must be given a title and summary by the state attorney general, but some say the AG should have the authority to turn down the numerous long-shot and outright offensive measures that have come up throughout the years.

However, this kind of power could enable elected partisan officials to filter out all the measures that go against their own political agendas. Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, told NPR that the initiative process must “be kept at arm’s length from the Legislature and the politicians who frequently want to usurp its power.”

A state judge’s ruling upholding the unappealing ballot initiative title and summary given to a badly needed pension reform measure triggered a lot of gloom Thursday from those who want to slow California’s slide toward ruin. But it’s not necessarily the end of the world.

Here’s a bit of the Sac Bee’s account:

“A Superior Court judge dealt San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed’s pension overhaul campaign another setback on Thursday, rebuffing Reed’s request to have the ballot initiative’s title and summary rewritten.

“Reed and other public officials sued Attorney General Kamala Harris last month, arguing that her description of Reed’s pension initiative, which would empower local governments to change future pension benefits for current workers, was fatally biased.

“The sentence in dispute states that the measure ‘Eliminates constitutional protections for vested pension and retiree healthcare benefits for current public employees, including teachers, nurses, and peace officers, for future work performed.’ Reed and his allies said in their lawsuit that description was ‘false and misleading’ in a way that ‘creates prejudice’ against the measure.

“Not so, said Sacramento Superior Court Judge Allen Sumner. Going through the contested sentence word by word, Sumner found ‘nothing false or misleading’ about how Harris described Reed’s measure.”

It’s not 2004 — pension crisis has sunk in

I dispute the conventional wisdom that invoking “teachers, nurses and peace officers” is super-compelling to stopping voters from voting for pension reform.

Despite opposition from “teachers, nurses and peace officers,” sweeping pension reform measures passed easily in San Jose and San Diego in 2012.

It’s not 2004 still. People understand the crisis is real and is affecting other government priorities in a negative way. Take it away, Washington Post:

“SAN JOSE — Here in the wealthy heart of Silicon Valley, the roads are pocked with potholes, the libraries are closed three days a week and a slew of city recreation centers have been handed over to nonprofit groups. Taxes have gone up even as city services are in decline, and Mayor Chuck Reed is worried.

“The source of Reed’s troubles: gold-plated pensions that guarantee retired city workers as much as 90 percent of their former salaries. Retirement costs are eating up nearly a quarter of the city’s budget, forcing Reed (D) to skimp on everything else.

“’This is one of the dichotomies of California: I am cutting services to my low- and moderate-income people . . . to pay really generous benefits for public employees who make a good living and have an even better retirement,’ he said in an interview in his office overlooking downtown.

“In San Jose and across the nation, state and local officials are increasingly confronting a vision of startling injustice: Poor and middle-class taxpayers — who often have no retirement savings — are paying higher taxes so public employees can retire in relative comfort.”

‘Maviglium’ will bomb at box office

Once again, this is the liberal Washington Post’s framing of the issue, not Fox’s Sean Hannity.

I hope the hard work by Reed (no relation) pays off with the initiative making the ballot. If it does, it will pass, barring a 10-1 edge for the status quo-ers in campaign spending.

“Elysium” was a bomb at the box office. “Maviglium” will be,too.

By Katy Grimes

The budget released by the Governor last week projects that despite billions in cuts to programs over the last several years, California will still be $9.2 billion in the hole next fiscal year.  This deficit is forcing $4.2 billion in additional cuts to education and other critical public services, with the possibility of up to about $5 billion more cuts. However, these cuts are also prompting calls for tax increases.

Despite this dire fiscal condition and California’s inability to pay for many programs, notorious politician and former state Senator Don Perata is still pushing a ballot measure that would create a brand new state spending program.  The measure called the California Cancer Research Act would add nearly $1 billion worth of new spending annually, and pay for it with tax hikes on already burdened Californians.

If the initiative is approved by California’s voters, the tax on cigarettes in the state will increase by $1.00 per pack. The additional tax revenue will be used to fund cancer research, smoking reduction programs, and tobacco law enforcement.

This spending includes $16 million on the new bureaucracy to run the program, along with all the salary and pension costs that go with it.

The fiscal estimate provided by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office reports:

“Increase in new cigarette tax revenues of about $855 million annually by 2011- 12, declining slightly annually thereafter, for various health research and tobacco-related programs. Increase of about $45 million annually to existing health, natural resources, and research programs funded by existing tobacco taxes. Increase in state and local sales taxes of about $32 million annually.”

Even worse, the measure allows the vast majority of the revenue – and all the research and facilities money – to be spent outside California. Revenue from the California Cancer Research Act is expected to help groups such as the National Cancer Institute, which has a dwindling budget.

Support for the measure comes from the American Cancer Society, American Lung Association in California, American Heart Association, American Stroke Association, all of which report decreasing revenue, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and Tom Torlakson, the California Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Interestingly, Inside Bay Area reported that Oakland City Councilmember Ignacio De La Fuente received a $25,000 consulting fee in August 2009 from “Hope 2010”, a ballot measure committee controlled by the Cancer Act campaign’s chairman, Don Perata. He was tasked with “contacting 10 labor groups for petition signatures and 10 business groups for campaign contributions in the Sacramento and Oakland areas.”

While education, public safety and services for the poorest in the state are being cut, this measure would send Californians’ precious tax dollars to other states.

According to Ballotpedia, 60 percent of the revenue (approximately $468 million annually) would to go research of cancer and tobacco-related disease “for the purpose of grants and loans to support research into cancer prevention.”

The initiative would create a 9-member governing committee charged with administering the fund. The California Cancer Research Act Oversight Committee will be made up of public employees.

Most people support cancer research, but there could not be a worse time for California to be creating a new spending program.  We need to fix the many problems in Sacramento, and not create huge new bureaucracies and spending programs that taxpayers have to support.

Not surprisingly, opposition to the measure comes from Californians Against Out-of-Control Taxes & Spending, funded by Altria Group Inc., the parent company of tobacco manufacturers Philip Morris USA.

The Cancer Research Act is an example of the wasteful and bogus programs voters are tricked into voting for under the guise of health and research. Ballot measurers like this that have helped  put California in the horrific budget predicaments, year after year.

The bottom line: California taxpayers should not be funding private non-profit organizations, which already get tax breaks from the government.

Joel Fox of Fox and Hounds addressed his concerns with the measure last March: “Unfortunately, it is another example of ballot-box budgeting in which revenues are limited for specific purposes with little oversight from outside agencies.”

JAN. 12, 2012

By ANTHONY PIGNATARO

What to do about public employee pensions is the thorniest, nastiest, most difficult question facing Sacramento lawmakers today. Few issues cause such disappointment and despair. Yet one group of activists and accountants is plugging away, trying to get a new pension reform initiative passed.

Their only real ally is recent history. In the last three years the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) has lost about a billion dollars investing in Newhall Ranch residential development, $100 million in Palo Alto apartment conversion and another $500 million or so in Manhattan apartments. These and other losses have considerably sapped CalPERS’ investment returns—so much so that a Jan. 20 Los Angeles Times story reports they “raised concerns about the ability of the country’s largest public pension system to cover the cost of retirement for 1.6 million state and local government workers, retirees and their families.”

Paying pensions and benefits for retired state workers is a huge drain on the state budget that robs other programs and services (health care, education, parks, etc.) of much needed funding. What to do about steadily (sometimes even retroactively) rising pension benefits for state workers at a time of declining tax revenue and economic calamity has long been one of  Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s priorities—and one of his biggest disappointments. “I ask the Legislature to join me in finding the equivalent of a water deal on pensions, so that we can meet current promises and yet reduce the burden going forward,” Schwarzenegger said during his Jan. 6 State of the State Address, but few believe the Legislature will do much about it.

With such officials as Ron Seeling, CalPERS chief actuary admitting that current state worker pension benefits are “unsustainable,” you’d think Schwarzenegger would have no trouble getting action on pension reform. But no.

“I don’t think it’s in the interests of the Democrats because they’re protecting public employee unions,” Assemblyman Ted Gaines, R-Roseville. To be fair, most Republicans dip into the public employee till as well—last April newly elected Republican Assembly leader Martin Garrick accepted $2,000 from the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, for instance—which makes the power of the unions even stronger.

“Given the fact that public employee unions hold such a deep stranglehold over the Legislature, it will take a Don Quixote to crusade against any and all barriers,” Marcia Fritz, a Citrus Heights-based certified public accountant. As president of California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility (CFFR), the group currently trying to qualify a pension reform initiative for this year’s ballot, Fritz knows all too well about tilting at Quixotic endeavors.

The seven-page measure—called the “New Public Employees Benefits Reform Act” until the Attorney General’s office writes an official title—would “provide for fiscally responsible retirement benefits for new public employees” hired after passage.

“[T]he current system of retirement benefits is too costly, overly generous, and cannot be sustained for new public employees,” the proposed initiative states. “Under the current system, some public employees can actually receive more income in retirement than they earned while working. The current system could result in billions of dollars in new taxes to meet the retirement obligations for public employees. Many local governments may be threatened with bankruptcy if no change is made.”

Currently, there are all sorts of pension formulas used by the state’s 2,000 or so public agencies and municipalities. Because of the “3 Percent at 50” plan—which calculates pension benefits by multiplying 3 percent of the worker’s salary for each year of employment—that was sponsored by then-Assemblyman Lou Correa,D, Santa Ana, in 1999, many municipalities allow workers to retire at 50 with close to 90 percent of their salaries. Fritz said her group’s initiative eliminates all that by setting up a single formula for calculating pensions for all public workers statewide.

Under the initiative, firefighters and police officers would receive 2.3 percent of the salary multiplied by each year of service upon retirement at 58. The multiplier for public safety employees would be 1.8, and they would have to wait until 60 to retire. For public employees that work for agencies that don’t require Social Security contributions, new employees would retire at “no less than the full retirement age, as defined in the United States Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance Program” to get 1.65 percent multiplied by their years of service (the multiplier for public workers who have to make Social Security contributions is 1.25).

It is, taken as a whole, only a slight reform. The initiative’s benefit package doesn’t affect current pensions at all, and in many ways is still more generous than private sector plans. Because the initiative is still in the signature-gathering phase, CalPERS hasn’t done any kind of cost analysis of it, according to Edward Fong, CalPERS spokesman.

“It’s similar to Social Security,” Fritz said. “And that is a huge threat to unions, because it takes away their negotiating tool. California is the only state that allows pension benefits to be negotiated in a contract. Other states have more open methods.”

Fritz says her CFFR has met with Schwarzenegger, but he has yet to formally approve the measure. Though a pension reform advocate, Gaines said he doesn’t yet know enough about the CFFR initiative to endorse it.

This isn’t to say Fritz completely lacks supporters. “I think it’s great,” Orange County Supervisor John Moorlach said when asked about the proposed initiative. “Pension reform has to be done—there’s been too much abuse. CalPERS does funny things. New benefit improvements are automatically retroactive. That’s not in the Constitution! CalPERS has taken everything actuaries have in their toolboxes and used it to the max. If we have another downturn like this one, CalPERS will implode.”

Moorlach, who got elected Orange County treasurer in the wake of that county’s 1994 bankruptcy and promptly put the county on a more or less strong fiscal footing, brings considerable clout to CFFR’s effort. But he also has recent, actual experience reforming pensions.

Last October, Schwarzenegger approved a deal hashed out between the Orange County Board of Supervisors and the Orange County Employees Association (OCEA) that creates a two-tiered pension plan for county employees. Under the deal, county employees can now choose between the current benefit package or a second plan that would require them to retire at a later age (65 instead of 55) but would get far less money taken out of the monthly paychecks than those opting for the current plan.

“It’s an experiment,” Moorlach said. “A lot of new hires are young, and may not want a pension plan. Current employees could drop into the lower tier, where they would get a raise of sorts because their withholdings would go down. We negotiated it the old fashioned way. It wasn’t easy.”

Nick Berardino, the OCEA’s general manager, says his county’s pension reform effort should be the model for the state. “Our feeling is that, obviously, pensions are an issue that requires considerable examination and evaluation,” he said. “But changes should be made at the collective bargaining table, not through an initiative. You can’t have a cookie-cutter resolution—you have to go to the bargaining table and work out the problem. We were able to do to this in one of the most conservative counties in the state, so it can be done.”

Berardino’s acceptance that state employee pensions need work is far from universally held among union officials. In fact, most look at CFFR’s proposed initiative not as a moderate change—the substituting of a single, still generous benefit for a motley mix of extremely generous benefits—but as something dangerous and sinister that must be stopped at all costs.

“We’re very, very strongly opposed to it,” Californians for Healthcare and Retirement Security chairman Dave Low told Investment Management Weekly in December. “It’s draconian. It dramatically cuts pensions for every new public employee.”

Fritz bristled at such criticism. “Dave Low says it reduces health benefits 50 percent,” Fritz said. “It does not. The cost is reduced by 50 percent—not the benefit. The benefit only goes down three percent. You have to work longer to get more benefits.”

For officials like Gaines, that’s the whole point.

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t have decent pay, decent benefits for public employees,” Gaines said. “We’ve just gone too far.”