If only business was as good to America’s struggling older workers as it is for the AARP.
In 2010, the AARP had assets totaled $2,546,636,000. According to its 2013 Financial Report, the AARP’s assets had grown to $3,026,971,000 in 2012 and $3,393,94,000 in 2013. By 2014, the AARP’s assets totaled $3,585,853,000.
That’s an 40.8 percent rise since 2010.
Meanwhile, a recent AARP survey showed that half of the people ages 45 to 70 who experienced unemployment during the past five years are not currently working. Fifty percent of survey respondents reported they were either unemployed or had dropped out of the labor force. Among those who had become reemployed, nearly half said they were earning less than in their previous jobs.
In my book, Betrayed: The Legalization of Age Discrimination in the Workplace, I show indisputably that older workers are suffering from unaddressed and epidemic age discrimination. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 was weak to begin with and has been eviscerated by the U.S. Supreme Court. Older workers have far less protection than their counterparts under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion and national origin. My attempts to interest the AARP in working to ensure that older workers obtain equal justice under the law have met a solid wall of disinterest. This, despite the fact that age discrimination in the workplace denies millions of older Americans the right to work and dooms them to poverty or near poverty in their old age.
The AARP calls itself the leading advocate for Americans aged 50 and older. But the AARP also sells the most popular “Medigap” plans in the United States, AARP Medicare Supplement Health Insurance Plans, as well as a huge array of travel services, high tech products and … you name it.
The AARP’s for-profit enterprise, AARP Services, Inc., is essentially marketing access generated by its non-profit entity, the AARP Foundation, to 37 million of America’s oldest consumers.
Is it really too much to ask the AARP to use some of its riches to do more than just take surveys – to act to insure that older workers are treated equally under the law, and not subjected to bogus restructurings and downsizings, chronic unemployment and poverty in old age? Fifty years of inequality is enough.
That is disturbing and why I dropped my membership. They also refused to lobby for senior issues in Nevada Legislature such as Death with dignity.
Thanks for all you have done, Keith, in your capacity as chair of the Chair of the Elder law section of the Nevada Bar Association and Director of Civil Rights for.Seniors.
This example just proves how profitable insurance companies are, when “gap” coverage can rise by billions over a few short years even with the alleged higher costs for older people. Imagine the profits now in the trillions generated by the six primary insurance companies “servcing” the working population, now increased by the subsidies generated by the ACA, which was nothing more than sending them millions of new customers with no profit loss to them. That’s why this country needs to eliminate private, for profit, insurance companies and adopt Universal Health Care like the other first-world countries. That is the only solution to lowering true costs and treating everyone equally despite what illnesses you develop, or premiums based on what state or county you currently live in.
It is also disconcerting that the AARP has at the very least has put itself in the position of having its motives questioned by its quest for profits from health insurance sales.