Nari Rhee, Ph.D., is director of the Retirement Security Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Her current research focuses on the retirement crisis facing California and the U.S. in the context of declining pension coverage, and policies to improve the retirement income prospects of low- and middle-wage workers. Before returning to the Labor Center in November 2014, she served for two years as manager of research at the National Institute on Retirement Security. She formerly held appointments as a postdoctoral scholar, visiting scholar, and associate academic specialist at the Labor Center. Dr. Rhee has written on a wide range of issues related to pensions and retirement security, including public pension reform, international pension systems, and retirement plan design. Her analysis of the retirement savings crisis and its racial dimensions has received broad media coverage and informed policy debates at the state and national levels.
Dr. Rhee’s previous work engaged a range of issues related to the economic security of low-wage workers, including care work, income inequality, housing affordability, uneven regional development, and labor-community coalition building. She earned a Ph.D. in geography from UC Berkeley in 2007, a master’s degree in urban planning from UCLA in 1998, and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 1996.
Testimony by Nari Rhee before the U.S. House HELP Subcommittee highlighting the challenges that most American workers face in the existing retirement system and offering some considerations for integrating lifetime income products into 401(k) plans.
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Rolling back Medicaid access through cuts and bureaucratic hurdles will have far-reaching and disproportionate impacts on older adults. In particular, the work documentation requirement poses an especially draconian barrier to older adults, given the steady dropoff in employment after age 50 due to deteriorating health, age discrimination, and increasing responsibility to provide care for aging family members.
The onerous documentation needed with Medi-Cal work requirements would increase administrative costs and reduce enrollment and access to care, including for people who are already working or otherwise should be exempt.
“A lot of the people who lost coverage were working or eligible for an exemption, but the red tape was so bad that they couldn’t navigate it,” says Nari Rhee, director of the Retirement Security Program at the University of California Berkeley Labor Center.
Rhee offered a broader point echoed by several Democrats during the hearing: For most workers, retirement insecurity is driven by wages and cost-of-living pressures that limit the ability to save in the first place.
Rhee also cautioned that the “pricing can be opaque for annuities,” such as the lifetables used and upside lost from variable annuities. “It’s not like a target-date fund, it’s a lot more complicated,” she said.
Nari Rhee, director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center’s Retirement Security Program, also cautioned that “any move to expand the use of annuities as a default investment must include strong guardrails to protect employees’ hard earned savings.”
“As this committee considers potential steps to further include complex lifetime income products to 401(k) plans, I urge you to prioritize the majority of our workforce that is being failed by our retirement system, not just through lack of access to employer sponsored retirement plans, but through low wages that make it difficult to save, especially when housing, food, and healthcare are increasingly unaffordable,” concluded Nari Rhee.
Rhee said it’s difficult to know what the impacts of federal Medicaid cuts will be on the in-home program. “The state has to make some difficult decisions around how they budget for that,” she said.
“In practical terms, there are all kinds of legitimate reasons why, especially older adults, might not be able to meet the work requirements in terms of actually putting in the number of hours, and that’s before we even get to all the administrative issues,” Rhee said.
Medicaid has been a critical “lifeline” for 11 million older and working-age Americans. These people often face difficulty maintaining their jobs due to health problems, age discrimination, and the responsibilities of caring for older parents or partners.
Proposed measures to impose historic cuts on Medicaid spending could have a devastating impact on millions of older working-age Americans, according to a new analysis issued by the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
“Based on the experience of other states, even if you spend a ton of energy on outreach, a lot of people just don’t realize what they have to do,” said Nari Rhee.
