Close the Social Security Claiming Delay Medicare Trap: Hearing Witness to Congress

[Northeast Agent]

Close the Social Security Claiming Delay Medicare Trap: Hearing Witness to Congress | ThinkAdvisor

A Medicare enrollee advocate says many who put off retiring end up paying much higher Medicare Part B premiums.

Lack of awareness of the Medicare Part B late enrollment penalty is especially painful now, because more workers are working past age 65 and learning that they can increase monthly benefits by putting off collecting Social Security retirement income benefits, Riccardi said. The percentage of eligible people who started collecting Social Security benefits by age 65 fell to 60% in 2016, from 92% in 2002, Riccardi said.

The result is that 760,000 people are now paying the Medicare Part B penalty, and the penalty is increasing those people’s Medicare Part B premium bills by an average of about 30%, Riccardi said.

 

[LostDollar]

The trend to work past age 65 is driven, in part, by the increase in the Social Security Full Retirement Age; not peoples' desire to work longer.

The system is broken because the powers that manage it separated the Medicare Entitlement Date from the Social Security Full Retirement Age.

 

[somarco]

I enroll several folks each year who are retiring past their 65th birthday. Can't recall WHEN I encountered someone paying a LEP. Who ARE these people?

 

[LostDollar]

One subset of the group would likely be people who thought COBRA was employer coverage that allowed them to be eligible for a Part B SEP. This question is asked multiple times a year on this site.

 

[StephanieCJ]

In 4 years, I’ve run into one person paying extra because of COBRA (and that was reversed because it was someone at the Social Security office that told her the COBRA would suffice). Most people have group coverage of some variety. They are throwing out numbers that don’t exist for the sake of getting paid to be an advocate.