AARP Oregon to Focus on Age Discrimination and Rx during the Legislative Session

The Oregon legislature convenes for a short 5-week session in the beginning of February. Nevertheless, we have ambitious goals and will be lobbying on a critical issues important to you and your family including:

● Stopping Workplace Age Discrimination: We are advocating to create an Age Discrimination Task Force that will make policy recommendations with the goal of finally fixing the clearly broken law during the long 2021 legislative session. There is no place for age discrimination in Oregon and yet older workers consistently report experiencing or seeing age discrimination in the workplace.

People are living and working longer, and experienced workers bring expertise, maturity, and perspective. Yet negative stereotypes and mistaken assumptions mean that older people are often treated unfairly in the workplace.
Discrimination is discrimination. Treating people differently based on age is just as wrong as discriminating based on gender or race. That’s why AARP is fighting all forms of age discrimination in the hiring process and on the job, including an unfair court decision that makes age discrimination more difficult to prove than race- or sex-based discrimination.

To read more, check out our latest AARP Bulletin on Workplace Age Discrimination.

● Controlling Drug Prices: AARP is fighting for you to lower the cost of prescriptions. In 2018, the Oregon legislature passed a law that requires more transparency of prescription drug costs when the manufacturer increases the price over 10% threshold per year. And in 2019, we supported a new law that requires 60-day advance notice for price increases. In 2020, along with many other groups, we will be urging the legislature to pass a Prescription Drug Importation bill that will allow the state to negotiate and import drugs from Canada.

It’s unfair that Americans pay the highest prescription drug prices in the world. We must crack down on price gouging and the greedy practices that keep prices artificially high. It’s time our leaders stick up for people 50+ and their families. Learn more about AARP's nationwide efforts at https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/advocacy/prescription-drugs/