Wall Street’s biggest worry about New Jersey is the government’s $100 billion debt to its workers’ pension funds. But because of a shift in accounting rules, its unfunded obligation for retirees’ health care benefits has tripled — and is now nearly as large, Bloomberg News reported. The Garden State’s latest audited financial statements said that the new rules increased the estimate for what it owes for medical benefits to $97.1 billion in fiscal 2017, up from the $36.5 billion that it previously reported. While it dropped to $90.5 billion in 2018, that is still more than any other state, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, and amounts to about $10,000 for every New Jersey resident. Even California, with more than four times the population, doesn’t owe as much.
