Click here to access the "Taking Healthcare Off the Books" toolkit!Accounting principles are often seen as politically neutral collections of credits and debits. In fact, they are contested terrain that can have a huge impact on the distribution of wealth and power in the real world. In 1990, the Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued a new rule to require private sector employers to list the cost of future retirement healthcare as a liability on their financial statements. In 2008, these requirements were extended to the public sector by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB). These rules have led to devastating attacks on retiree health and welfare benefits and have placed additional strain on public sector budgets. This session will explain the impact of these FASB/GASB standards.
Participants will learn how to find this GASB liability in publicly available documents and use it to build support for single payer in your state.
