Retirees' Medicare Part B premiums have remained at the same level in 2015 as they were in 2014, but absent some political moves in Washington, that will change in 2016.
According to an August paper from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, Part B premiums for higher-income Americans are scheduled to rise significantly in 2016. That's because it appears there will be no cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security recipients in 2016 — for only the third time in the past 40 years.
Lower inflation and no 2016 COLA for Social Security recipients will cause a "flap in the Medicare program" next year, point out CRR authors Alicia Munnell and Anqi Chen, because by law, the cost of higher Medicare Part B premiums cannot be passed on to most beneficiaries — about 70%, they say, who are considered "held harmless" on premiums — when they do not get a raise in their overall Social Security benefits.
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James J. Green
Jamie Green is editor of Jamie Green Reports, an advisor-focused writing, editing and shepherding service. He can be reached at [email protected]. Jamie is former Group Editorial Director of the Investment Advisory Group at ALM Media, where he had overall editorial responsibility for ThinkAdvisor.com and Investment Advisor and Research on Wealth magazines, monthly print magazines that have served advisors of all kinds for more than 30 years. In more than 30 years of experience in print and electronic journalism, Jamie has been covering the investment advisory industry since 1999. In the 1990s he worked for nine years at The New York Times, where he was editor of TimesFax, an electronic version of the newspaper of record now known as TimesDigest. In the 1980s he was editor of Tele/Scope, a pioneering electronic news service based in New York, and was editor of Telecommunications Research, a monthly journal. He holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from St. Hyacinth College in Granby, Massachusetts, and studied theology on the graduate level at St. Anthony-on-the-Hudson, Rensselaer, New York.
