Cutting Corporate Benefits to Retirees
        When you retire do you expect your company to continue to provide health care benefits? Not every company will, you know. And the ones who offer it now usually say so with their fingers crossed. 
        Jim Klein, American Benefits Council: "Those employers that do provide retirement health care coverage have been very careful to say 'this is what we offer now, but we are unable to make any kind of binding promise for the future."
        So even if you've got it you can't count on it. And indeed the more expensive health care gets. and therefore the harder it is for you to afford it. the more likely employers are to decide that they can't afford it either. 
        A new survey finds that 80% of large companies now require retirees to pay a greater share of health benefits. On the average 25% more than last year. in premiums, deductibles and co-payments for prescription drugs.

        Sylvia Bedford, the widow of a Lucent Technologies technician, had her healthcare [monthly] premiums go from 60 dollars to 360. Her late husband Tom loved his job with Lucent. 
        Sylvia Bedford, Widow of Lucent Retiree: "He was a hard worker." 
        In 34 years, says Sylvia Bedford, Tom only took 3 sick days: "He would go in at 6 in the morning, I wouldn't see him until 10 at night."
        They planned a long retirement together, but Tom fell ill with an incurable form of cancer, and with only two weeks to live he retired early from Lucent so he could leave his retirement benefits, including a death benefit to his wife. Or so they mistakenly thought. 
        Bedford: "It was to our shock and horror to discover that as of February of 2003, it was taken away."
        The courts have said that generally companies are within their rights to cut or eliminate benefits to stay competitive. Sylvia Bedford knows that her husband Tom never meant for it to be like this. 
        Bedford: "He sacrificed 11, the last 11 years of his life, traveling all over putting the company first and this is what they do?"
        Yes. This is what they do.