If you are like me, you do not worry much about changes in Social Security that will happen in the year 2030 or thereafter. That year seems impossibly remote, and some of us do not figure to be around then.

However, all Americans have reason for active concern about what is going to happen to our Social Security income starting less than a year and a half from now. On New Year’s Day of 2006, the full prescription drug program will kick in, part of the new Medicare law passed last year.

Implementing that law, the federal government will spend an almost unimaginable half-a-trillion dollars on these drugs over a period of nine years. Regrettably, most people on Medicare will get little help from these massive outlays. Worse than that, unless something is done, we will see larger and larger portions of our Social Security checks taken from us by the surging Medicare costs that we will be required to pay.

The figures behind this latter statement should shock us all. In 2006, out-of-pocket expenses will amount to more than one-third of an average 65-year-old’s Social Security income. Medicare premiums, deductibles, and copayments will take such a large bite out of that person’s check that he or she will, almost inevitably, find it hard to get by.

And, for those over 65, it gets worse. A typical 85-year-old person, for example, will have to pay 42.7% of income, leaving only a little more than half of his or her Social Security check to meet other expenses.

As the years go on, the situation will become even more dire. By 2025, recipients aged 65 will be charged more than 50% of their total Social Security income for Medicare expenses. An 85-year-old woman or man will then have to pay an incredible 63% by way of those deadly premiums, deductibles, and co-payments.

All of this information comes, not directly from advocates for older Americans, but from the federal government itself. In early July, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released numbers that reveal what will happen to Social Security recipients, starting soon.

Families USA, an agency based in Washington D.C., has alerted me to this crisis. I much appreciate the work of this foundation, begun in 1981 by Kate and Philippe Villers, of Concord, Massachusetts, and serving the national community marvelously well ever since.

If you want to keep up with health care issues, few web sites will serve you better than www.FamiliesUSA.org. The agency’s director, Ron Pollack, I consider one of this nation’s best advocates for social justice with a special focus on health care for all.

The message sent by Pollack carries the heading “Shocking Data on Medicare and Social Security.” The figures could be considered x-rated because of the threat they pose not only to those of us who are now old, but to those who will become so over the next decades.

Ron Pollack sums up the lesson to be drawn from this material: “These data demonstrate, more clearly than ever, why we need to find ways to slow the rate of prescription drug inflation and why we need to resist further efforts to shift health care costs onto Medicare beneficiaries.”

Families USA has taken action, not only by spreading news of the government’s numbers, but by urging support of legislation introduced into Congress by Representative Nancy Pelosi. That legislation would, in the words of Ron Pollock, “protect Social Security beneficiaries from having their retirement income wiped out by out-of-control soaring health care costs.”

I urge you to contact your own representative in Congress as well as your two senators and tell them you support Pelosi’s efforts and those of others to fix the problem. The election season will probably make them more receptive than usual to your voice.

One Social Security expert whom I have consulted, Yung-Ping Chen of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, feels confident that changes will be made. “The drug program has got to be modified,” he reassures this writer. “Policy-wise, it has no legs, it makes no sense,” he adds.

But Professor Chen, holder of the Frank J. Manning Eminent Scholar’s Chair in Gerontology, agrees on the need for advocacy. If older voters are heard from, it will increase chances for desirable changes, perhaps along the lines of Representative Pelosi’s proposed legislation.

Besides the threat to everyone’s pocketbook, the Medicare prescription drug plan has other major problems. Even AARP, the agency whose regrettable support proved crucial to passage of that plan, supports some changes in the new law. Thus far, however, the alarming figures released by the feds seem not to have stirred AARP to action.  

For our own good and the good of our national community, it is vital to raise our voices before paying for the cost of drugs bankrupts us all.

Richard Griffin