Dear Editor:
Kathleen Williams sounds reasonable in her quest for Montana’s lone congressional seat. What could be more reasonable than letting people who are not quite Medicare age “buy into ” the Medicare program? This actually begs the question of how much should we charge these people to “buy into” this highly subsidized government program?
When I first went on Medicare I assumed that the monthly premium I was paying for Medicare actually covered all the benefits I was receiving. When I looked into it I realized that was not the case! Even taking into account the amount of money the government receives from Medicare payroll taxes, the individual Medicare enrollee is highly subsidized by the government.
The average Medicare beneficiary should be paying four times as much as they do now to really cover the actual benefits they realize from the program. Actually, the average Medicare beneficiary only pays 25 percent and the government picks up 75 percent of the monthly tab. I verified this with Medicare last month. If we let these younger people “buy into” the program at the subsidized rate that current Medicare beneficiaries are paying, this would increase our national debt enormously.
I would like Kathleen Williams to explain to all of us taxpayers how she plans to accomplish this without increasing the national debt by billions, if even possibly even trillions of dollars.
Dr. W. David Herbert ESQ
Billings
