Employers Chip Away at Retiree Health Benefits

Geraldine Picha knew that her pension would be modest, given her tenure of just 15 years at the phone company.

What she did not expect was that her retiree health premium would eat up every penny of that pension -- and more.

"It's frightening," said Picha, 63, whose former employer has raised her medical insurance bill steadily since she retired in 1998. At $560 a month, it now eclipses the $514 pension check Picha earned from her years at what was then AT&T Corp. and a spinoff, Lucent Technologies Inc.

Picha, who lives near Chicago, remembers when a job at a big company meant "you were taken care of the rest of your life." But as retirees across the gamut of American industry are discovering, those days are ending.

Just as they are cutting back on pensions, employers are increasingly targeting health benefits as a way to save money, saddling older people with costs that companies used to accept as a routine part of business.

Over time, some maintain, growing legions of the elderly will find themselves with thousands of dollars in additional costs -- posing difficult personal choices over care and new pressures on a federal government that already faces a vast, uncovered liability for the old-age needs of the baby boom generation.

"Across the board, retirement benefits are on the chopping block," said Daniel D. Doyle, an attorney for former Monsanto Co. employees whose benefits shrank after their division was spun off and filed for bankruptcy protection. "As companies try to restructure and squeeze out shareholder value, they are going to rely more and more on Medicare and other government programs to fill the breach."

Retiree health benefits first took a big hit more than a decade ago, when new accounting standards required companies to more clearly disclose those costs -- prompting many employers to trim their offerings. More recently, the benefits are falling victim to rising healthcare expenses and corporate cost cutting.

On average, retirees account for 29% of the corporate medical bill for large employers that offer such benefits, according to Hewitt Associates, a benefits consulting firm. And like other medical costs, those for retirees have risen steadily -- as much as 10.3% from 2004 to 2005, according to a survey of large private employers by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Hewitt.

Retiree medical benefits are now offered by just 1 in 3 large employers, down from 2 in 3 in the late 1980s, according to a study by the Kaiser foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust.