If you’re keeping score, we’ve already seen well over $1 trillion worth of bailouts this year, for everybody from Fannie Mae to the nation’s nine biggest banks. Jeffrey R. Brown, a professor of finance at the University of Illinois, says we might as well add as much as  $100 billion for a pension bailout.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., the federal agency that insures pensions, is already  $14 billion short of being able to cover its obligations. And that estimate was made before the recent stock-market collapse. Falling stock prices will hurt pension-plan returns, and a prolonged recession may force some companies into bankruptcy, where they’d be able to dump their pension obligations on the PBGC. Moreover, Brown reminds us, the PBGC recently made the boneheaded decision to invest some of its own assets in the stock market. Brown says in a university news brief:

Over the next decade, we could easily end up with another $50 billion to $100 billion or more of taxpayer money needed for a bailout – in this case the bailout of failed corporate pension plans that didn’t put adequate money aside. One-hundred billion doesn’t seem like as much as it did a few weeks ago, but it’s still a tremendous amount of money.

Brown’s proposed long-term solution involves charging risk-based premiums for pension insurance. In other words, a company with an underfunded plan would pay much higher premiums than a company that kept its plan well-funded. We may have to jettison the government-run insurance model, Brown suggests:

Private insurers would have an incentive to price the insurance properly, just like auto insurers charge more for a 16-year-old male who’s been driving for a month than a 50-year-old woman who’s never had an accident.