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

If Monday, January 21, was not the coldest day of the winter, it was right down there fighting for the title. You had to be brave just to be outside, exposed to frost-biting temperatures combined with bitter winds. Only people with a compelling reason would dare to stay exposed to these elements for more than a few minutes.

And yet, on arriving outside of our city hall, I found some 450 of my fellow citizens walking round and round, many of them holding anti-war signs and calling out their opposition to the proposed military campaign against Iraq.

This Monday was, of course, a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King whom the demonstrators would later invoke as a champion of peace. That part of the event would happen in the warm confines of a nearby church, where members of the community were to read aloud some thoughts of the slain leader.

Not a few of this day’s demonstrators, I noticed almost immediately, were people comparable to me in age. I had come hoping talk with them about their reasons for taking a public position against the war, even before it starts. I confess to seeking support  for my own  serious misgivings about the course our federal government is seemingly about to take in our name.

The first person I approached was a woman from East Cambridge named Grove Harris who, against the cold, was eating a sweet potato as we talked. “We need peace desperately,” she said. “We can’t afford this war, morally or financially. We can’t be the policeman of the world. We need to invest in a sustainable economy.”

A couple from Concord, Catherine and Richard Parmalee, both in their 60s,  walked by me. “I’m opposed to the unilateral action by the U.S. against the United Nations,” Richard told me. He recalled growing up seeing on the wall of his room the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and drawing lasting  inspiration from it.

A kindergarten teacher, Sally Baker, 55, said “I don’t think war solves anything; It just kills people. What’s the point?” She thinks it important for us to “teach children at an early age that violence and war aren’t appropriate.”  She tells how war has touched her family: “My brother went to Vietnam and got blown up. He’s alive but he’s suffering terribly from post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

Mimi Grosser, asked about the possibility of influencing the decision makers, replies: “Well, you know, I have very strong memories of Vietnam; I started on a small scale like this. I think you have to start somewhere.”

A friend, Lester Lee, a Northeastern lecturer, had spoken out that morning in his church, focusing on Dr. King’s opposition to the Vietnam War. “I think the anti-war sentiment is very strong in the black community,” he told me. “I hear people talking about it, it’s there – – I just don’t know how it’s going to be connected out.”

“I wasn’t happy about going out in the cold; I hate the cold,” 87-year-old Boone Schirmer told me later, in the comfort of his house. “I’ve broken the same hip twice and I’m deaf as a post, but I’m glad I went.”

His wife, Peggy Schirmer, is a year older; she walks with difficulty and suffers the early stages of dementia. But she took part in the demonstration, using a wheelchair  to get around. “When you get old, you are more limited,” she says, “but you live within your limits. We went up and down the line twice.”

Peggy regrets recent events. Needing some help with her words, she tells me: “I think our country has not been as I’d like it to be lately. To see what’s happening to our country is discouraging.”

Sure, I know most of the people I talked to live in Cambridge. And I am aware how the politics of my fellow citizens there are often the object of ridicule.

But I am convinced that negative feelings about the planned assault on Iraq fill the hearts of a huge number of citizens all across our country. You don’t have to be living on the East or West Coast to be disturbed about the militarization of our nation.

Older people, especially, have lived through enough history to have learned how often we have been lied to and manipulated by our national government. (Currently I am reading a new book by Daniel Ellsberg who tells of his part in doing this when he worked in the Pentagon in the middle 1960s.)

Some of us veterans of history doubt the morality of the proposed enterprise. The bishops of my spiritual tradition have, in fact, said it does not satisfy the requirements of a just war. Granted., the prestige of these Catholic bishops has been badly damaged over the past year; still they can recognize a harmful and unjustified military effort when they see it.

Richard Griffin

According to Bob Byrd’s count, 11,709 people have served in the Congress of the United States since it was first founded. Only two have served longer than he.

You might wonder if this 86-year-old senator from West Virginia should have retired by now. To a questioner who asks what keeps him going, he answers: “Love for the Constitution of the United States.”

In a speech that I attended recently, he told of going to a little two-room school when he was a child. “I studied at night by the light of a kerosene lamp,” he recalled. Decades later when he was in the Senate, he received his law degree after completing his studies at George Washington University. His diploma was handed to him on graduation  day in 1963 by President John Kennedy.

This short, thin, white-haired dynamo of a man speaks with passion about the plight of his country. “We must defeat those who would tear our republic down,” he proclaims, leaving no doubt about who “those” are.

In his newly published book, “Losing America,” Byrd denounces the attacks on the separation of powers in the federal government, a separation that he calls “the guarantor of our liberties.”

This man possesses an acute sense of history and fears the effects from the servility of elected representatives in the House and, especially, the Senate. Of too many of his colleagues, it can be said that, “when the president says ‘jump,’ they ask ‘how high?’”

“God give us men,” he cries, without feeling the need to add “and women.” Strong statesmen are desperately needed at this time in history, Byrd believes, because the administration “follows policies of utter recklessness. Today, I fear, we see our government at its worst.”

The crowd packing the church where the senator spoke cheered him to the heavens. The many young people there greeted him like a pop star, celebrating his every sentence. They rose to their feet several times during his talk, cheering both his analysis of what’s wrong and his call to action.

Introducing Byrd was another elder statesman, 72-year-old Ted Kennedy. The Massachusetts veteran senator praised his colleague “for never being a rubber stamp for the White House.” He went on to say of the venerable West Virginian: “Bob always speaks his mind, regardless of the consequences.”

Kennedy recalled Byrd’s vote against the Iraq war and the way he said, on the Senate floor, “I weep for my country.” For himself, the Massachusetts senator called that same invasion “the greatest blunder in American foreign policy.”

Bob Byrd believes in the ability of the individual to make a difference. “Awaken,” he cries, hoping that individual Americans will rise up and show leadership, persuading their fellow citizens to get involved in effecting change.

I found it exhilarating to see up close an elected leader who embodies so many of the classical virtues. He began his talk by reciting from heart a poem that he had presumably learned long ago. His oratorical skills remind me of the rhetorical style inherited from the ancient Greek and Roman orators.

In a fine review essay on Byrd in the current New York Review of Books, Russell Baker describes the Senate as it was in 1959 when Byrd broke in. Of its purpose, he writes: “The Senate was created to prevent presidents from governing recklessly and to bring them to their senses when they persisted in governing recklessly anyhow.”

In what Russell Baker, approvingly, calls “a highly intemperate book,” Senator Byrd “flails away at Bush and his docile Congress with the zeal of a campus radical.”

Now retired himself (though still writing occasional pieces), Baker makes a gerontological point about his subject. “Byrd,” he writes, “has discovered–in the nick of time–that very old age, however heavy its hardships, can also leave one free at last. How sweet it must be for a politician, after half a century of holding his tongue, to speak his mind as Byrd does in appraising the President.”

The reviewer makes the point that Byrd’s political leanings are not what his new book and his recent speeches might indicate. “During his half-century in Congress no one ever accused Byrd of being a liberal or even a hothead,” Baker writes. In fact, examining his record would cause deep distress to most liberals. So it seems as if this is a man who, in old age, feels free to rise to the occasion.

At a time of crisis in America’s political system, Senator Byrd asserts his deeply held convictions about the dangers to our liberties, dangers that most politicians seem content to ignore. As an older person myself, with a vivid sense of the history that has transpired in my lifetime, I applaud this senator and hope that he can rouse us to action for our beloved country.

Richard Griffin

“Most elders are betting the farm.” This sentiment comes from Leonard Raymond, executive director of HOME (Home Owners Options for Massachusetts Elders). It expresses the long considered and well informed opinion of someone who feels strongly that many home equity loans in general, and reverse mortgages in particular, serve elder citizens badly.

Raymond’s Boston-based nonprofit agency has worked with elders over the past 20 years, helping them find useful alternatives to loans against the value of their home. Though he does not have exact figures, he estimates the number of Massachusetts elders taking home equity loans annually is in the thousands. That is reason for regret because undoubtedly many will come to financial grief.

“We are very much into equity conservation,” Raymond assures this inquirer, and he considers loans a last resort. In his view, “If you have to leave your home, it’s better to leave with cash than without.”

Open-ended reverse mortgages are very expensive, far more so than ordinary mortgages, says this expert. The application fees, closing costs, insurance, compounding interest, and monthly servicing fees involved in such deals can beggar elders, if they do not take care.

An attractive alternative for some elders might be “term reverse mortgages.” These devices feature a fixed indebtedness limit, usually no more than two-thirds of the property’s value. According to HOME, they also have “much lower closing costs, and no mortgage insurance premiums or service fees.”

Many elders take out open-ended reverse mortgages to make home repairs, unaware that there are alternative sources of financing. The city of Boston, for example, makes funds available for this purpose, as do some other municipalities. Though this money is steered primarily toward low-income homeowners, the income ceilings do rise over time, making more and more people eligible.

Another remedy for those needing help is property tax relief. Yet astonishingly few elders avail themselves of this benefit. In Massachusetts, Raymond reports, only 15 percent of those who are eligible take advantage of it. In Boston, only an astounding 7 of the 18,400 homeowners over age 65 have had their property taxes deferred.  They thus pass up a better deal than reverse mortgages can provide.

AARP has an extensive web site with information about reverse mortgages, and that agency does caution elders about the need of counseling before they make decisions. Len Raymond, however, judges the AARP site deficient in several ways. “Equity depletion is not there,” he says, emphasizing again that, for most elders, their home is their main financial asset. To deplete its value is dangerous.

And, according to him, most of the counseling, even for federally supported loans, takes place over the telephone, rather than in people’s homes. Homeowners need to consider seriously many factors before they can make sound fiscal decisions about their residences. It is not enough to have a single brief conversation with someone, no matter how well informed that person may be.

Ideally, financial planning needs to be part of a remainder-of-life planning process, Raymond suggests. Elders should take a long-term perspective that envisions the changes that will inevitably take place in their lives. In view of increased longevity, we must plan for the long haul.

With these cautions in mind, you can still find valuable some of the information on the AARP website: www.aarp.org/revmort-basics. I found the fact sheet included here helpful for beginning investigation. However, again, there is no substitute for talking with impartial knowledgeable people who are looking out for your good.

In writing this column in response to a reader’s request, I had envisioned simply providing technical information about reverse home equity mortgages. But it now seems that I can best serve readers by recommending that they contact HOME. The number of this Boston nonprofit is 1 (800) 583-5337. Over a 21-year period, this agency has worked with almost 24 thousand households and without charging fees.

This is a crucial time for many older homeowners. According to recent report, the indebtedness of Americans over age 75 has quadrupled of late. Foreclosures of property owned by elders have increased at an alarming rate. HOME, only one agency, is currently handling 80 such cases.

The approach of this agency can be summed up thus: “Loans are a last resort and should be needs oriented, consumer friendly, should provide an equity reserve for future contingencies, and should be informed by a long term planning process.”

Many new corporations have recently sprung up that take as their sole business the selling of home equity loans. Some of these businesses are presumably the targets of Raymond’s statement: “A lot of for-profit entities would like us to disappear.”

Scams threaten to rob us older homeowners of our greatest financial security. There are all sorts of slick operators at work who will not scruple to get us to act fast and disastrously, unless we take precautions. My own consciousness has been raised by contact with HOME, reason enough for my recommendation above.

Richard Griffin