TheoWire

After her fiance died suddenly, Patricia Galvin left New York for San Francisco in 1996 and took a job as a tax lawyer for a large law firm. A few years later, she began confiding to a psychologist at Stanford Hospital &Clinics about her relationships with family, friends and co-workers.

At a time when companies are scaling back health benefits for other retirees, former top executives at many corporations are receiving partial or full lifetime medical coverage on top of pensions valued at millions of dollars, a Wall Street Journal analysis of dozens of recent securities filings indicates.

The loud message comes from one company after another: Surging health-care costs for retired workers are creating a giant burden. So companies have been cutting health benefits for their retirees or requiring them to contribute more of the cost.

Corporate owners get a variety of tax and accounting benefits from life insurance on employees.

The kind they load up on is "cash value" life insurance, so-called because besides a death benefit, it includes a tax-sheltered investing account. This account is like a big, nondeductible IRA: The policyholder deposits money into it, the insurer subtracts a slice to pay for fees and insurance, and the remainder grows tax-free. That growing remainder is known as the cash surrender value, or cash value. It's an asset.