Saturday is the day my new iPad is supposed to be delivered.

It is also the deadline for tens of thousands of state and county employees to decide whether or not to invest in upgrading their state retirement plans. It’s a very consequential decision for state employees.

You’ve certainly read about the expected iPad deliveries.

As far as I can tell, there’s been no news coverage of the retirement upgrade program, despite the significant number of families directly impacted and the amount of confusion over the choices involved. It’s an issue on which reporting could have done a big service by clarifying the issues and providing some pros & cons of the available buy-in.

There are also other policy issues. How does this potentially affect the Employees’ Retirement System’s finance? Have the state’s current financial problems and the investment losses of the past couple of years changed the way the program looks? Its costs and benefits?

But looking back, I haven’t been able to find any news coverage except back when the Legislature authorized the move several years ago. Nothing to help inform the public or those public employees facing the decision.

I would consider it one of those lost news opportunities.

Here’s some new information I’ve just seen from a March 17 update circulated at UH:

Election and Hybrid Payments Elections made:
5,602 (23%)

Number of upgrade payments:
3,090

Upgrade payments received: $155 Million

Group Meetings (completed)
Number of meetings: 83

Attendance: 8,495

And speaking of public retirement systems, the Progressive States Network recently took on what they term the “hype” of an impending pension fund crisis.

They say:

As this Dispatch will emphasize, there is no crisis in most state retirement systems, even according to the numbers of the researchers demanding state leaders take unneeded action to cut the incomes of retirees. And despite the hype from a few carefully selected anecdotes of retirees gaming pension systems, the reality is that the overwhelming number of public employees receive pretty bare-bones benefits, in some cases not enough even to keep them out of poverty.

We do need a debate on public pensions, but one that sees protecting them as part of a broader campaign to restore retirement security for all American workers, especially in the wake of a stock market collapse that has revealed the empty promises of Wall Street in hyping 401k-style private accounts as a substitute for the guaranteed retirement income of social security and defined-benefit pensions. Public pensions are actually a key tool for driving economic growth in the states, both through the purchasing power of retirees themselves and through the direct investments of pension assets in job creation. Any reforms undertaken should be done to both enhance the positive economic role of retirement systems in our state economies and to increase equity among retirees to raise living standards for low-income retirees.

This final link is only indirectly related to the finances of retirement, but it is fascinating to look at.

It’s a chart from National Geographic Magazine on health care reform. Click to view the chart, then click again to enlarge.

Simply put, the chart shows that the U.S. spends far more on health care than other nations, but Americans report fewer doctor visits each year and have lower life expectancies than most of the other modern industrialized countries of the world. Clearly, our high-tech pay as you go system has a lot of glitter but hasn’t been able to deliver the goods. Democrats needed this graphic front and center in the health reform debate, don’t you think?