Higher Medicare Fees for Wealthy

Re “Senate OKs Higher Medicare Charges for Wealthy Elderly,” June 25:

As a Medicare recipient who will probably be hit with higher premiums, I have only one complaint: The paying of increased charges should begin with people making as little as $35,000 per year. Medicare is not an insurance program. Recipients are paying only about 25% of the costs. The rest is made up by government borrowing and Social Security taxes on the middle class and working poor, whose incomes percentage-wise are hit the hardest.

Why should the working poor be bearing so much of the cost of the elderly?

HOWARD LOCKWOOD

Lake View Terrace

Medicare costs for “affluent” recipients may be increased to $2,102 per year. Well, Webster’s dictionary defines one who is “affluent” as one “having an abundance of material goods”; one who is “wealthy.” My income is a bit over $50,000, and I certainly do not have an “abundance of material goods” and no reasonable person would consider me wealthy. I can’t believe that Congress would consider me “affluent.”

On the other hand, I know someone who thinks I am rich. It’s my 6-year-old granddaughter. She says, “My Papu is rich! He always wins when he plays bridge!” Maybe she should run for Congress.

MILT LEVY

Laguna Niguel

I note with great concern that current discussions on means testing Medicare propose treating two people living together as a married couple less favorably than people living together in any other state such as unmarried heterosexual couples or homosexual couples. It appears that being married must be considered a socially less desirable arrangement than these others and consequently it should be discouraged by the Medicare program.

Family values have taken a real beating in the recent past and we are living with the consequences of that fact. One would hope that strengthening the family would be an important consideration in writing new legislation. To propose discrimination against the most fundamental feature of a strong civilization is ludicrous.

Our leaders should be actively moving to remove current marriage penalties in the existing law such as the tax code rather than inventing new ways to punish marriage with the Medicare laws.

PAUL S. CLARK

Northridge