Five individuals, including former Congressman Dick Armey and lead plaintiff Brian Hall, have filed a lawsuit accusing the Social Security Administration (SSA) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) of improperly adopting illegal and coercive policies that deny otherwise eligible retirees their rightful Social Security benefits if those retirees choose not to enroll in Medicare.
According to Dr. Jonathan Wright’s Nutrition and Healing newsletter, enrollment in Medicare relegates you only to care in the “Medicare, or some say Mediocare, system. You cannot go outside the system even if you pay for the noncovered service personally.”
According to Kent Masterson Brown, the constitutional attorney representing the plaintiffs (he is also a published historian), in 1993 and 2002 SSA issued new rules. They stated, in effect, that any retiree who elects to opt out of Medicare Part A (the Medicare hospital insurance program) will automatically lose his or her Social Security retirement benefits. The rules were promulgated without being published beforehand in the Federal Register and without benefit of public comment as called for by federal regulations. The plaintiffs in this case believe that the Clinton administration (in 1993) and the Bush administration (in 2002) acted unlawfully—substantively, by violating the Social Security Act and the Medicare Act of 1965, and procedurally, by violating the federal government’s Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (Title 5 of the United States Code, beginning at Section 500).
MedicareLawsuit.org has the entire timeline of events regarding the lawsuit. Dr. Wright points out in his newsletter that Medicare regulations currently permit up to 600,000 individuals, institutions, and entities to read your medical records in electronic form at any time without your knowledge or consent.