by Garland Shewmaker

Created on: February 22, 2010   Last Updated: February 23, 2010

SOCIAL SECURITY, MEDICARE INJUSTICE

After working our butt off, paying faithfully into the system for most our life, if we “kick the bucket” before we get to draw any of our benefits, then$255 is all we get from our investment. Not a very good return for something that we invested in for almost half a century! This is like working 40 odd years and paying 7.65 % of your wages for a $255 burial policy! Think about it.

At this time – just due to the high costs of medical insurance alone— hardly anyone can afford to retire, because name brand prescription drugs are outrageously expensive and Medicare doesn’t pay for them. Medicare has helped ease the burden some with the new Medicare -D Plans, but the plan details were so confusing that many folks didn’t get signed up before the deadline.

The Government saw it’s opportunity to offer one monthly premium price and charge us another. How? By setting a deadline and imposing a penalty for those who didn’t sign up before the deadline, knowing full well that there would be a large number who wouldn’t understand al the confusion or which plan to go with and wouldn’t be signed up in time. Now after the deadline, when you do sign up, you must pay a 1 percent per month penalty– in my case an extra $5.30 a month which doesn’t sound like that much. But when you crunch the numbers it starts to become clear how we were manipulated. Let’s just say that of the millions on Medicare there were 500,000 who didn’t meet the deadline and were penalized $5.30 a month. Wow! That is two and a half million dollars extra monthly revenue from now on! Figure that up over twelve months and it becomes a giant snowball– $30,000,000 a year just from the one percent penalty!

Let me explain how this plays out:  At 65, my wife and I started drawing our Social Security, but I continued working in order to have medical benefits through my Employer. In the meantime, Medicare-D was initiated, but hadn’t been fully worked out – not to my satisfaction at least– so when I did retire I hadn’t made up my mind which insurance carrier to go with, so I researched a few different carriers trying to decide which one would fill our needs. Nineteen months later, after deciding that one was no better than another I signed up for  Medicare-D - with AARP– with a monthly premium of $37.40

Now it’s one year later and I receive a letter

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