A Medicare enrollee advocate says many who put off retiring end
up paying much higher Medicare Part B premiums.
Congress should help
keep older workers from making painful Medicare Part B enrollment mistakes, a
Medicare enrollee advocate said today at a hearing on Capitol Hill.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) is
the federal agency in charge of helping people sign up for Social Security
retirement benefits and Medicare health benefits.
Fred Riccardi told lawmakers that, today, SSA
enrolls many people who retire at age 65 in traditional Medicare Part A
hospitalization coverage and Medicare B outpatient and physician services
coverage automatically, when those people start claiming Social Security
benefits.
But the trend toward workers working past age
65, and putting off the time when they collect Social Security benefits, has
broken that system and saddled hundreds of thousands of retirees with
extra-high Medicare premium bills, Riccardi said.
Resources
·
An
article by a compliance specialist on issues facing active employees who have
reached the Medicare eligibility age is available here.
Today, Riccardi said, even most workers who do
work past age 65 end up getting Medicare Part A coverage automatically.
“Enrollment in Part B is much more
complicated,” Riccardi said.
People who work past age 65 and stay in their
employers’ health plans may have no idea whether they’re supposed to sign up
for Medicare Part B coverage, and even employers’ benefits people may not be
clear on what the rules are, Riccardi said.
“Mistakes are indeed very high,” Riccardi
said.
Consumers who put off signing up for
Medicare Part B coverage are supposed to pay a 10% penalty for each
year of delay.
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.
Riccardi, president of the Medicare Rights
Center, appeared at a House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee
hearing on improving health coverage and health outcomes.
The hearing was streamed live on the web.
H.R. 2477, the
BENES Act Bill
Riccardi said Congress can close consumers’
Medicare Part B awareness gap by passing H.R. 2477, the “Beneficiary
Enrollment Notification and Eligibility Simplification Act of 2019” (BENES)
bill.
The 10-page BENES bill would require
the SSA to include notices about how Medicare enrollment works in the
Social Security benefits statements sent to individuals ages 60 to 65.
The bill would also update Medicare Part B
enrollment period and effective-date-of-coverage rules.
The notice section calls for the SSA to
develop the Medicare enrollment notice language in conjunction with a number of
different groups, including state insurance commissioners and Affordable Care
Act public exchange programs.
Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., introduced the bill.
The bill has five Democratic sponsors and cosponsors, including Ruiz, and six
Republican cosponsors.
Allison Bell, ThinkAdvisor's insurance editor,
previously was LifeHealthPro's health insurance editor. She has a bachelor's
degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's
degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern
University. She can be reached at abell@alm.com or on Twitter at
@Think_Allison.
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