The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the postal reform recommendations publicly issued by a Presidential Task Force, including the OPM Director, late last year.  The FEHBlog has been following Postal reform because one of the reform initiatives that the Postal Service pushed was to set up a Postal Service Health Benefits program within the FEHBP. Under this new program, annuitant coverage would be fully integrated with Medicare thereby reducing the Postal Service’s FEHB funding burden.

The FEHBlog, who did not watch the hearing, ran across this valuable Govexec overview of the hearing which in the FEHBlog’s estimation aligns with the written testimony. To wit,

Gary Grippo, the Treasury Department’s deputy assistant secretary for public finance and one of the leaders of the postal task force, * * * argued that a popular, bipartisan proposal to require all postal retirees to use Medicare as their primary form of health care coverage [as described above] would shift postal liabilities to taxpayers. Such a move, he said, would break with the mandate that the Postal Service remain self-sufficient. [OMB Deputy Director / OPM Acting Director Margaret] Weichert, too, said the administration was “categorically opposed” to anything that would shift USPS away from self-funding, which she suggested Medicare integration would do.