Do large corporations practice age discrimination with regard to retiree health and life insurance benefits?
February 19, 2010 
7 Comments
At age 56 I was forced into retirement by diagnosis of cancer. When I reached age 60 the supplemental life insurance premiums I have paid for years increased by 70%. If that’s not age discrimination, what is it?
You were lucky you even had supplemental life insurance benefits to begin with.
Most employers would have bounced you out of their system upon your retirement.
You also could have possibly made some more income by buying a disability insurance policy and could have put off being ‘forced into retirement’ by allowing the disability policy to pay your income until you would have reached a better retirement age.
Those policies are even cheaper than supplemental life policies. And, since the risk of becoming disabled is far higher than dying early….they make more sense.
just ask whirlpool corp
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It is age discrimination, it just is not illegal age discrimination.
The older a person is, the greater risk they are for dying. They choose, I’m sure for ease of operation, to group people into brackets rather than raise your premiums every year. Odds are you paid too much when you were in the younger years of the bracket and less than your risk when you reached 59. When you hit 60, you joined a new bracket.
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If you felt you were discriminated, you should have said so to your employer. Talking about it here won’t help you since we don’t even know which company you worked for.
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Health, life, and disability insurance are ALL ABOUT age discrimination – otherwise, the insurance premium for an 18 year old would be the EXACT SAME as they would be for an 80 year old.
I am sure you didn’t mind the (legal) discrimination when you were the healthy 30 year old – because you didn’t have to pay the same as the 60 year old cancer survivor! Just think about it – not ALL discrimination is unfair.
And if you think it is, then put your money where your mouth is – and cough up the extra premium for your car insurance, that it would cost if you were 16 years old and driving the exact car you have right now (donate it to your church!!). Your agent could tell you how much the difference is . . . but I’d guess it will be THOUSANDS.
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Agent, 20+ years
btw, congrats on being a cancer survivor!
Same thing for a 16 year old boys insurance being astronomically higher than a 50 year old mans. Insurance rates are based on the risk, that may be discrimination but that is how it works.
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You were lucky you even had supplemental life insurance benefits to begin with.
Most employers would have bounced you out of their system upon your retirement.
You also could have possibly made some more income by buying a disability insurance policy and could have put off being ‘forced into retirement’ by allowing the disability policy to pay your income until you would have reached a better retirement age.
Those policies are even cheaper than supplemental life policies. And, since the risk of becoming disabled is far higher than dying early….they make more sense.
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The basis on which the insurance company decides the amount of premium to be paid by each person is determined mainly by Mortality Tables.
All insurance companies refer to different mortality tables. These tables differ from country to country. The mortality table indicates the probability of a person dying in a particular age group. For e.g. in an age group of 25-30 years, the probability might be just two, but this probability would increase for a higher age group of 60-70.
Mortality rate is a measure of the number of deaths (in general, or due to a specific cause) in some population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit time. Mortality rate is typically expressed in units of deaths per 1000 individuals per year; thus, a mortality rate of 5.5 in a population of 100,000 would mean 550 deaths per year in the entire population.
Life Quotes: http://www.insureme.com/landing.aspx?Refby=614500&Type=life
Take care,
Ron – InsureMe
References :
http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=13335289
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality