Quin-essential Cases:Why can't we decline Medicare benefits?

An interesting article from the DC Examiner about Medicare benefits and Social Security:

Judge Rosemary Collyer of the U.S. District Court for D.C. last week was given a chance to strike a major blow for freedom from bureaucratic idiocy. Every American taxpayer, along with every citizen who wants to make his own decisions on health care, should hope Judge Collyer brings the bureaucracy to heel.

This column first covered this case, Brian Hall v. Charles E. Johnson, last October. The five plaintiffs, who now include former House Majority leader Dick Armey, are challenging a policy of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) that denies Social Security benefits to anybody who refuses to enroll in Medicare.

Read that again: As the policy now stands, if you want to pay for your own health care rather than let taxpayers finance it through Medicare, government will not let you receive the Social Security benefits for which you have spent a lifetime paying taxes.

Note that nobody is trying to avoid contributing to Medicare. The plaintiffs merely want to decline the tax-funded benefits for which they already have paid. None of them want the bureaucracy, the governmental intrusions into their privacy, and the rationing of care they believe Medicare entails - so they volunteer to let taxpayers off the hook by providing their own health care coverage.

But DHHS won't let them. Or at least not if they want to receive Social Security benefits. Forfeit Medicare, says DHHS, and you must also forfeit Social Security even if you've paid for it for half a century.

This is nuts. Utterly nonsensical.

The rest of the article, at DC Examiner
_______________________________________________________________