A federal judge has struck down a proposed regulation allowing companies to provide younger retirees with better healthcare benefits than they gave to older ones who qualified for Medicare. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission proposed the rule change to slow the trend of companies eliminating retiree health benefits altogether. The nation's largest advocacy group for retirees, the AARP, argued that this amounted to age discrimination.
See "Judge Protects Equality of Benefits for Retirees", Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2005