What with years of layoffs, employee buyouts and sending jobs offshore, corporate America has helped create a pool of about 800,000 early retirees who now find themselves in a health care bind. 

They are no longer eligible for employer insurance programs, too young to qualify for Medicare and unable to afford private insurance on their own. 
But now corporate America, having created the problem, is trying to help solve it. 

A group of some of the nation’s biggest companies plans to announce today a program meant to make health insurance available to their former employees ages 55 to 64. 

Not only would the insurance policies be relatively affordable, but no one could be turned down for coverage, regardless of medical condition. That is a crucial provision, because high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer and other medical afflictions of late middle age can make it hard for early retirees to find an insurer willing to cover them at any price. 

The specifics will vary from employer to employer, with some companies helping subsidize the coverage. Other employers might simply create large pools of retirees, making them eligible for discounted group rates. 
Typically, the policies will carry a moderately high annual deductible — perhaps $500 to $1,100 or so in out-of-pocket medical expenses before coverage kicks in. The retirees’ monthly premiums will range from $400 to $1,200 or more, depending on whether the employer defrays part of the cost. 
That is significantly lower than what people in this age range can expect to pay, if they can find individual insurance at all. 

“If I have had a triple heart bypass, there’s not a snowball’s chance of getting coverage in the individual market,” said Richard J. Lueders, who oversees benefits at the big Michigan utility DTE Energy, a member of the employers’ committee that created the program. 

The sponsor, the HR Policy Association, represents 250 large companies, including General Electric, I.B.M., Sears, Starbucks and United Parcel Service. Although the association says it does not know how many total early retirees there are among its members, a few of the bigger companies have tens of thousands, while some newer technology businesses have none. 

The HR Policy group acknowledges that its effort can probably not help more than a small fraction of the 800,000 pre-Medicare retirees currently without insurance — or others among the nation’s more than four million people in the 55-t0-64 age group who are not working and may be at risk of losing insurance if the costs continue to soar. 

People in that precarious category include Larry Little, a 58-year-old retiree in Charlotte, N.C. Mr. Little spent 32 years as a tire factory worker but is having trouble keeping up with the rising premiums of the insurance offered by his former employer, Continental Tire North America.

“I was just getting by on my pension,” said Mr. Little, whose monthly pretax income is $1,740. “Now with these costs — an extra $500 a month — I’m using up my savings.”

Continental Tire North America is not part of the HR Policy Association, so Mr. Little would not be helped by that group’s new program. 

In fact, in 2008, during the HR Policy program’s first year, no more than about 20 of the member companies are expected to offer the new health coverage. But many others are considering joining for 2009, according to the group’s president, Jeffrey C. McGuiness, who said he was not yet free to identify the participants until they told their own people about the program. 

United Parcel, however, has said it is among those planning to participate. 
Despite the program’s limited reach the HR Policy group hopes it can help “shape and influence” the national debate on health care reform, said Ronald A. Williams, the chief executive of Aetna, the big insurer that will administer the coverage.

If the effort seems a change of heart for corporate America, in some ways it is.
Since the early 1990’s, when new accounting rules forced companies to start reducing their profits to reflect the future costs of retiree medical benefits, many have simply stopped providing such coverage. Early retirees, who even in the best of times were not widely eligible for health benefits, have been especially hard hit. 

These days, only 18 percent of large employers still contribute to the cost of health benefits for retirees younger than 65. That is down from 30 percent in 1993, according to a 2006 survey by the Mercer Health and Benefits consulting firm. But some companies now see the drawbacks of treating older employees and retired employees primarily as a financial liability — if only because of the signal it sends to workers still on the payroll in the prime of their careers. 

“This is a burning issue for corporations,” said J. Randall MacDonald, a senior vice president at I.B.M., which has 30,000 early retirees. “Employees have become increasingly concerned.” 

With many companies now facing shortages for certain types of skilled employees, many want to keep or recruit experienced people by saying “we can give you access to coverage when you retire,’ ” said Helen Darling, the president of the National Business Group on Health, another organization of large employers.

And even among companies that may still be eager to move older workers to retirement before age 65, some employers see the virtue of not letting health benefits be a reason for an employee to cling to his or her job long after losing interest in the work itself. 

Maybe of most significance, the new HR Policy program, to be called Retiree Health Access, will in many cases cost relatively little for employers.

Aetna has agreed to offer the policies in part because the big employers are able to amass large enough pools of early retirees to help spread the risks and costs of insuring people of an age susceptible to major medical expenses. 

“The new program will help companies stay in the retiree medical game,” Mr. Lueders said. His company, DTE Energy, has already been providing health coverage for about 3,000 early retirees, mainly from its Detroit Edison unit.
Preliminary versions of the program have received an unpublicized two-year trial run at several big employers, including United Parcel. 

As the program proceeds beyond the experimental stage, United Parcel plans to start offering about 6,000 nonunion early retirees and their spouses a range of options, including a safety-net catastrophic coverage policy, said Al Rapp, United Parcel’s corporate health manager. Such policies typically cost less than fuller coverage because they pay only for major illnesses and injuries.

Aetna, which already covers more than 1.5 million retirees in traditional employer health plans, hopes to keep costs down for the new plans through “medical management” programs that advise and monitor people with chronic problems like diabetes and heart failure, said Mark T. Bertolini, an Aetna executive vice president. 

General Motors, an HR Policy Association member that has been closing production lines and pushing thousands of workers into early retirement, is studying the program, said Bruce E. Bradley, G.M.’s director of health care strategy and public policy. 

“This could be important in improving both the G.M. picture and the national picture, as a contribution on the issue of the uninsured,” he said.

G.M. has been staggered by its current health benefit obligations to more than 430,000 retirees. But nonunion employees hired at the company after 1993 — a category that happens to include Mr. Bradley — were no longer promised retiree health benefits. Instead, they received money through a tax-deferred savings plan. 

“I can spend it on anything I like,” he said. But if General Motors adopts the new Retiree Health Access program, Mr. Bradley, who is 62, could make that money go a lot further by buying into it. 

“For me,” Mr. Bradley said, “it would be a soft landing.”