freebird5825
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
a few thoughts..."generous" is a relative term. I would characterize it as a "good" or "decent" plan, but it's certainly not free & I've known folks with better and/or cheaper health insurance plans through their large company private sector employers.
I've put many dedicated career years in with a large organization (the fed govt) - one of the reasons I stuck with it was the health care plan.
It's quite important that we have a relatively stable & non-corrupt govt workforce. Reduce federal employee pay & benefits to the level of WalMart & you will soon have a govt workforce like they do in Mexico. You think you are unhappy with govt services now......
here's some hard numbers to work with...pretend you work for uncle sam and go to Office of Personnel Management Insurance Programs Main Page and put in your zip code and select a few plans to do a benefit comparison to your own.
or just to look at bare numbers, see http://www.opm.gov/insure/health/08rates/2008non_postal.pdf
find your state and see the ranges of premiums.
some real data - my current premium for medical insurance as a survivor benefit, self only, with no high deductible, is approx $100 per month, and is self paid. that's a bare bones premium level for a single person with no dependents and of course it goes up from there.
medical insurance premiums for feds tend to be less than retail (private sector) because the insurance companies all have to bid against each other for potentially 100s of 1000s of federal employees. so they have to put their best foot forward to compete for the award. hence lower rates (maybe).
fed medical insurance rates and private sector insurance rates = apples and oranges
in the same way, AARP can get better group rates by the sheer volume of their membership.