Health Costs May Contribute To Boomers Retiring Later

Financial advisors can dream all they want about serving high-net-worth clients who have $10 million in retirement savings and can support 50 or more years of retirement at age 45.

The reality, advisors say, is that many ordinary, moderately affluent baby boomer clients will have to try to keep full-time, permanent jobs for many years after the normal retirement age simply to pay for health coverage.

“I try to avoid using the word ‘retirement’ until people are in their 80s,” says Michael Dubis, president of Touchstone Financial L.L.C., Madison, Wis.

Dubis already deals with many working clients past age 65 and boomers who intend to work past the normal retirement age, simply because he enjoys talking to clients who are “wired to contribute.”

But Dubis says concerns about the cost of post-retirement health care already are playing a role in older boomer clients’ decisions about efforts to “phase into” retirement, work part-time or postpone major cutbacks in working hours until they suffer from serious health problems.

Aetna Inc., Hartford, recently reported that the typical retiree is spending an average of about $640 a month on health coverage premiums and health care expenses.

Officials at the U.S. Government Accountability Office touched on health coverage issues in a review of strategies that the U.S. Department of Labor ought to take to help older workers build bridges with employers.

“Working later in life could help minimize job vacancies and skill losses, increase personal retirement savings, and ease fiscal pressures on Social Security and Medicare through increased tax revenues,” Barbara Bovbjerg, a GAO director, writes in a letter presenting the GAO’s findings. “Yet most American workers take Social Security retirement benefits at age 62, and little has been done to encourage those who can and want to work later in life to do so.”

The health coverage needs of workers in the 55-64 age category and the over-65 category could be areas in need of attention from regulators and Congress, Bovbjerg suggests.

Boomers are more likely to have health coverage than other adults, and when the GAO organized 16 focus groups across the United States consisting of workers and retirees ages 55 to 70, “relatively few participants in each focus group indicated that they were compelled to work to acquire health insurance,” Bovbjerg writes.

But some focus group members wondered whether the cost of covering their health benefits makes them less attractive to employers. One focus group member said, “I’m thinking they let me go because of my age, and they don’t have to pay extra insurance.”

One barrier for boomers who hope to work past age 65 is a federal law requiring that employer-sponsored health coverage be the primary insurer for workers over age 65 and that Medicare be a secondary insurer for those workers.