Company fired 65-year-old with cancer to avoid paying for his treatment, feds say

A sales executive at a Texas-based auto company was diagnosed with cancer when he turned 65 — then he was fired and replaced by a younger worker so the company could avoid paying his medical bills, federal officials said.

Gregg Orr Auto has now agreed to pay the man $325,000, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced in an April 16 news release.

McClatchy News reached out to the company and its attorney for comment but did not immediately receive a response April 16.

Gregg Orr Auto, which owns car dealerships throughout the Southeast, maintains a self-insured health plan that directly covers the cost of employees’ medical expenses, officials said.

The 65-year-old sales executive had been with the company for seven years by the time he was diagnosed with cancer in the fall of 2019, federal officials said in a complaint filed in the Eastern District of Texas, Texarkana division.

He took medical leave from the Texarkana office to undergo surgery Dec. 19, and he returned to work less than a month later, officials said in the September 2023 complaint.

EEOC officials said he “rushed back to work” against his doctor’s recommendation “because he had seen (the company) push workers with medical conditions or older workers out of the company in favor of younger workers or individuals needing less medical care.”

The man said he worried the same would happen to him.

Then he got the $150,000 hospital bill about a week after he returned to work.

Officials said the company knew it was liable for the man’s medical bills, including 30 radiation treatments to follow his December surgery.

On Feb. 11, 2020, Gregg Orr Auto told the man “his employment and health insurance would end, effective immediately,” officials said.

His employer told him they were eliminating his role, but federal officials said that wasn’t the real reason for his termination.

“Greg Orr Auto knew the company would be exposed to the employee’s ongoing healthcare expenses under its self-insured employee health care plan and therefore replaced him with a significantly younger worker in his mid-30s,” the EEOC said.

Federal officials accuse the company of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by discriminating against the man for his age and his cancer diagnosis, then replacing him with a “substantially younger individual,” according to the complaint.

To avoid litigation, the government and the company agreed to settle, but Gregg Orr Auto denies wrongdoing.

As part of the consent decree, the company agreed to update its anti-discrimination policies and train managers on the ADA.

“The EEOC appreciates Greg Orr Auto’s willingness to undertake significant training to ensure workers’ rights are protected in the future,” Birmingham District Director Bradley Anderson said in the release.

Texarkana is in northeast Texas along the border of Arkansas.

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