I believe it changed in the early 90’s (93 or 94) with Clinton. You can’t opt put of Medicare or you’ll lose SS.
“I believe it changed in the early 90’s (93 or 94) with Clinton. You can’t opt put of Medicare or you’ll lose SS.”
Well I’ll be darned. I took Armey’s comment to mean that it COULD happen, but it has already happened, sadly.
I found this:
“The five plaintiffs, who now include former House Majority leader Dick Armey, are challenging a policy of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) that denies Social Security benefits to anybody who refuses to enroll in Medicare.
Read that again: As the policy now stands, if you want to pay for your own health care rather than let taxpayers finance it through Medicare, government will not let you receive the Social Security benefits for which you have spent a lifetime paying taxes.
Note that nobody is trying to avoid contributing to Medicare. The plaintiffs merely want to decline the tax-funded benefits for which they already have paid. None of them want the bureaucracy, the governmental intrusions into their privacy, and the rationing of care they believe Medicare entails - so they volunteer to let taxpayers off the hook by providing their own health care coverage.
But DHHS won’t let them. Or at least not if they want to receive Social Security benefits. Forfeit Medicare, says DHHS, and you must also forfeit Social Security even if you’ve paid for it for half a century.
This is nuts. Utterly nonsensical.”
I do know, though, that folks over 65 can use their spouse’s employment health insurance (until spouse retires), but maybe that’s an exception.