The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS) are both California pension plans addressing the needs of public sector workers. Both pension plans provide covered workers, as well as their spouse and dependants, with pension benefits in the event of disability, retirement, or death. In addition, the pension plans include provisions for current employees to receive health benefits as well. In the state of California, these two public pension plans cover over 2.5 million employees, spouses, and dependents of covered employees. To get an idea on how large these plans actually are, the CalPERS pension plan paid nearly eleven billion dollars in retirement benefits in the 2007 to 2008 fiscal calendar. The CalSTRS is known as the second largest public pension fund in the United States, second only to the CalPERS pension plan.