Give credit to Rep. Gary Palmer (R-AL) for trying to reverse a perverse decision by President Joe Biden that forces Social Security recipients to take Medicare benefits even when they don’t want to.
Palmer’s Retirement Freedom Act serves the causes of both individual choice and of fiscal discipline, saving taxpayer dollars while perhaps leading to better health for some elderly people.
Palmer’s worthwhile effort continues a complicated, 15-year battle. Way back in 1993, bureaucrats in the bowels of the Clinton administration issued an advisory document telling administrators that anybody who accepts the Social Security benefits earned through a lifetime of payroll taxes is not allowed to opt out of Medicare benefits even if the recipient prefers a private healthcare alternative. This would have nothing to do with whether people could avoid paying into Medicare — the pay-in is mandatory, either way — but only whether they could choose to forgo the Medicare benefits provided by taxpayers.
Based not on any specific provision of statutory law but more for ease of administration, the bureaucrats ruled back then that Social Security and Medicare benefits could not be decoupled. To forfeit the latter voluntarily would cause someone to forfeit the former involuntarily, even if it cost the federal Treasury more money. How absurd.
In 2009, a group of plaintiffs led by Republican former House Majority Leader Dick Armey challenged this bizarre interpretation in court. They argued that a senior should be allowed, if he so desires, to pay for his own healthcare, perhaps for better results, without involving Medicare. A district court judge preliminarily indicated Armey was right but then oddly reversed herself. Even more strangely, then-appeals-court Judge Brett Kavanaugh joined truly convoluted reasoning, against a top-notch dissent from a conservative colleague, to uphold the district court judge and the mandatory-Medicare rule. (The Supreme Court declined to review this awful decision.)
Because the rule was merely a bureaucratic interpretation, however, then-President Donald Trump was able to issue an executive order in 2019 to revoke it, and implicitly rebuke his own Supreme Court choice, Kavanaugh. Alas, Trump’s team (apparently) never fully finalized his order, so Biden, in turn, negated Trump’s directive and reinstated the dumb rule. Biden and his liberal allies like the rule, despite its cost, because they believe that separating automatic Social Security enrollment from automatic Medicare could “erode shared experiences, commitment to, and investment in” federal entitlements and therefore erode “popular support for the program.” In other words, it’s more about psychology and politics than it is about what the law actually requires, much less about fiscal responsibility or individual choice.
This is regulatory ping-pong at its worst. Back and forth go the regulatory orders, back and forth, all without any firm basis in any actual words of a statute passed by Congress, but instead originally based on a merely advisory bureaucratic directive.
That’s where Palmer came in, quietly introducing his Retirement Freedom Act in late December and announcing it last weekend. It would overturn Biden’s order and the 30 years of error that it represents.
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“People should not be forced to give up their private insurance because their Social Security is being held hostage,” Palmer said, quite reasonably. “Our senior citizens deserve to be empowered to take more control over their own medical decisions.”
And seniors certainly shouldn’t be forced to give up the Social Security benefits for which they paid for decades, just for the right to choose their own healthcare. There is no good reason for any member of Congress, in either party, to begrudge seniors that right, especially if it saves taxpayers money, which it would. Congress ought to pass Palmer’s simple but excellent bill and then dare Biden to veto it. In an election year, opposing retirement freedom might not be wise.