The Raise That Hurts

Mrs. Mary Freed, a 65-year-old Minneapolis woman who suffers from diabetes and heart disease, wrote an angry letter to her Congressman, Democrat Donald M. Fraser. "Why in hell," she asked, "when a person gets to 65 and is no good, don't they take a person out and shoot him instead of torturing him to death?" Mrs. Freed was understandably upset. Like 28 million other Americans, she was getting a 20% increase in her Social Security check.* But to Mrs. Freed and many other elderly and/or disabled pensioners, that was bad news indeed. The raise would lift their incomes just enough to make them ineligible for other types of Government benefits, chiefly welfare and Medicaid payments, which they can ill afford to lose.

The same misfortune affects some people every time Social Security payouts are increased. But in the past Congress has minimized the damage by directing public officials not to count a portion of the increase when calculating a pensioner's eligibility for other benefits. Such a directive was carefully included in legislation, introduced early this congressional session, that would have raised Social Security payments 5%. But when Senators and Congressmen decided to boost the increase to 20%, they voted the change as an amendment to another bill, and forgot to tack on the directive.

As a result, Mrs. Freed's Social Security payments have risen by $27, to $162.40 a month, but she will be some $16 a month poorer after the increase than before. She is losing $22 a month in disability assistance, and the rent that she pays on a public housing apartment will go up automatically by $7 a month, to $33. Also, she will lose at least temporarily the ability to charge doctor and hospital bills to Medicaid.

Her case is only too common. Some 187,000 old or disabled people will be dropped from welfare rolls, and 93,000 will lose Medicaid eligibility too. Others will have Veterans Administration pensions reduced by the amount of the Social Security increase, or will lose some of their food stamps.

Appalled legislators have introduced at least a dozen bills to make up for their forgetfulness. A flock of amendments have passed the Senate and one bill has cleared the House Ways and Means Committee. But the hastily drafted measures contain some ambiguous language, and if the House and Senate pass different measures, there may be no time to resolve the conflicts before Congress adjourns. The best chance for those who have been shortchanged would be for both chambers to unite immediately behind a bill, introduced by Congressman Fraser, clearly stipulating that Social Security recipients should continue to collect all their previous welfare benefits.

* The mail also brought a little white card announcing that the increase was "enacted by the Congress and signed by President Nixon." Every President since Eisenhower has had a similar card enclosed with the first checks bearing higher Social Security benefits. Nixon happily followed tradition, despite Democratic protests that he had advocated a much smaller rise in Social Security payments.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.