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This is not shaping up as the golden age of the Golden Years.

As I understand it, retirement is a phase that starts with a flurry of new hobbies and then rapidly tapers off into a series of medical procedures. So “golden” might be a bit of an overstatement in the first place.

But the abrupt end of corporate America’s lucky streak means a lot of us won’t even get the satisfaction of having somebody else pay for our problems – one of our favorite parts of the American dream.

Whirlpool Corp. has filed a lawsuit seeking to cut the medical benefits of retired Maytag Corp. workers. General Motors Corp. is eliminating lifetime health-care coverage for white-collar retirees at the end of the year. Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC already have cut health coverage for salaried retirees. The New York Times Co. has announced that non-union employees who retire on or after March 1, 2009, will no longer receive medical coverage after they turn 65, when they become eligible for Medicare.

It got easier to do things like this about 11 months ago, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decided that employers can reduce or eliminate health benefits for retirees when they hit 65 and become eligible for Medicare. It was presented as a “Good news, comrades!” situation – the official line was that either you give companies a way to save money, or they’ll just forget about retiree benefits completely.

Big companies are feeling the need for such changes because health care is costing them more than ergonomic chairs and holiday parties combined. Medical costs soar, life spans extend, the list of retirees grows and pretty soon you’re looking for any solution that doesn’t involve launching old people into space.

For now, it looks as if union membership comes in handy. The white-collar workers might have had the edge during their working years, when they had the best parking spots and never had to lift anything heavier than a stapler, but the unionized blue-collar folks are getting the last laugh.

Yet there’s always a catch. The Maytag situation suggests that when a company gets bought, even the unionized can get pushed into the cold. And everybody’s company will get bought at the rate we’re going.

Where will it all end? Socialized health care, no doubt, but between here and there stand many doctors with one hand on our wallet and the other on a treasured body part.

The public’s role in all this has been eerily similar to our role in the housing crisis, which is now closing in on “Cats” as the nation’s longest-running spectacle. For years, we asked, “How can those people afford those houses?” Now we know the answer: They couldn’t.

Likewise, it didn’t take a master’s degree in economics to make you wonder how big companies could handle being on the hook for decades of retiree health care.

I’ve met guys who retired at about 50 from places like Maytag, expecting never to worry about money again. And I thought: Is this how America is supposed to work?

In the first place, it suggested that the companies had to offer some serious bribes to get people to spend a career with them, which is sad. You can trade 30 years of dissatisfaction for a few years of fishing if you want to, but some of those first 7,500 afternoons might get kind of long.

More important, it looked an awful lot like a pyramid scheme. It’s hard enough to stay in business over the long term; when you’re supporting throngs of people who haven’t helped you make a sale in 20 years, it’s even tougher.

We’ll adjust in the long run. Even now, all over America, the corporate people in charge of hiring are being urged to look for applicants who are bright, trustworthy, ambitious and unlikely to live past the age of 66.