Employers’ reluctance to hire older staff and attempts to remove aging staff from payrolls can both be addressed more efficiently via the free market.  It is true that employer-provided pension plans are beginning to falter under the burden of an increasingly long-lived work force. However, this only serves to illustrate the flaws in employee benefit schemes of this type.  The state should not attempt to prop up a method of social welfare provision that is clearly ill suited to current trends in the labour market. Long term employment with particular firms, and especially jobs-for-life, are dwindling.  If individual workers were incentivised or obliged to obtain their own health insurance, and to set up their own pension plans, the burden of doing so would be shifted away from employers. Demand and consumer preference would dictate the price at which these services were delivered, reducing the overall cost of obtaining health insurance or paying into a pension pot.  Employers would no longer be required to assess potential employees in terms of the sums of money they are likely to draw from health insurance and pension funds. Businesses could once again focus on selecting new employees by merit.  Under the status quo, the increasing inaccessibility of employer-led pension schemes has left young adults stranded in a pension market where lack of demand has led to individual retirement plans becoming massively over-priced. Under the resolution, although the financial burden presented by a corporate pension scheme would be more predictable, it would still impact massively on businesses’ profits and artificially restrict the size of the pensions market.  Rather than bear the transaction costs inherent in continual renegotiation of pension schemes and employee benefit plans, rather than accept that worries about healthcare and pension liabilities will cause employers to avoid employing older people, side proposition should trust that the market will be as competent at providing fairly priced pensions as it is at providing fairly priced commodities.