Troubled Kodak moves to drop health coverage for Medicare-eligible, post-1991 retirees
The Washington Post, February 28, 2012
Eastman Kodak Co., looking to whittle expenses as it reorganizes under bankruptcy protection, wants to end health care benefits for about 16,000 retirees who are over age 65 and thus eligible for Medicare.
The possibility of losing their health care benefits has been a primary worry among Kodak’s 38,000 retirees. A letter Monday to Kodak retirees unaffected by the current proposal — those not yet 65 or who retired before October 1991 — did little to reassure them.
“This change …. will not apply to you,” the letter said. “However, Kodak continues to review its retiree medical, dental and survivor benefits and may in the future request court authority to modify or terminate additional benefits.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/troubled-kodak-moves-to-drop-health-coverage-for-medicare-eligible-post-1991-retirees/2012/02/28/gIQAnkICgR_story.html
And…
America’s Biggest Companies, Then and Now (1955 to 2010)
By Douglas A. McIntyre
24/7 Wall St., September 21, 2010
Today’s corporate America is dominated by service companies, tech firms, and huge retailers which have thousands of locations and hundreds of thousands of workers. At the end of the decade following WWII, corporate America looked very different from it does now. Fifty five years ago, most of the largest corporations in the US built cars, supplied car parts, or provided fuel for America’s vehicles.
The decades-long movement away from a United States dominated by smoke stacks to one dominated by computers and malls has also caused a shift in the geographic placement of the country’s better-paid workers. In the 1920s, they migrated to the North – places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan – where blue-collar jobs were abundant. Eight decades later their descendants are out of work in numbers that total well into the millions.
http://247wallst.com/2010/09/21/americas-biggest-companies-then-and-now-1955-to-2010/
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
Think back to half a century ago. If you worked for a great American company like Eastman Kodak you were assured of having very generous health benefits for the rest of your life. Things change.
One thing that should not change is the ability to receive health care whenever you need it. Tying health insurance to employment is not a sound policy, especially in these days in which full careers are almost never with a single employer with a stable health benefit program.
Your eligibility for health care should be determined simply by the fact that you exist. The Affordable Care Act will never get us there, but a single payer national health program certainly would.