AARP is taking the Equal Employment Opportunity Office to courtover wellness initiatives that it claimsdiscriminate against seniors.

At issue is a rule the EEOC approved in May that allowsemployers to offer financial incentives to employees whoparticipate in wellness programs. The rule also stipulates that theincentive cannot be worth more than 30 percent of the total cost ofan employee health plan.

Read more coverage on wellnessplans

Critics of the rule don’t see such programs as rewardingparticipants as much as punishing non-participants with higherpremiums.

Although all wellness programs must be voluntary, critics arguethat the difference in cost between participating and notparticipating is so great for employees that the wellness programis in practice non-voluntary.

For a bit of context, the average cost of an employee healthplan is $6,435 a year, according to an analysis by the KaiserFamily Foundation. Thirty percent of that would be roughly$2,000.

Employees are being pressured, AARP argues, to hand oversensitive medical information to employers through biometricscreenings or medical questionnaires that are performed at theworkplace.

Related: So are wellness plans actually worthit?

Employers have insisted that they put in place measures toprotect the privacy of participating workers, whose medicalinformation is often handled by a wellness vendor that the employeehas contracted with. The worker’s boss is never supposed to handlethe information or be provided with medical information aboutindividual employees.

James Gelfand, senior vice president for health policy for theErisa Industry Committee, told the New York Times that there was “no evidence” ofemployees being discriminated against as a result of wellnessscreenings.

In its suit filed with the Federal District Court in theDistrict of Columbia, AARP asks the court for a preliminaryinjunction to stop the rule from going into effect in 2017.

Before it announced its new rule in May, the EEOC had often beenthe one challenging employers for wellness programs that it deemedpunitive to non-participants.

A federal judge ruled last month in favor of a company, Orion,whose wellness incentive the EEOC had alleged went too far. In thecase of Orion, employees who did not complete a health riskassessment were told they would have to pay the full cost of theirpremium.

The debate over wellness puts the Obama administration in anawkward spot. On one hand, it pushed for wellness initiatives aspart of the Affordable Care Act, believing it was an important wayto make people healthier and thus reduce health costs. On the otherhand, Democrats are sympathetic to concerns about discrimination,as well as emerging research that suggests wellnessprograms do not produce the financial savings they havepromised.