Letters to the Editor | Jan. 5, 2025

Saquon Barkley needs just 101 yards to set the all-time NFL single-season rushing record. There is one game left this season. No doubt the 40-year NFL single-season rushing record holder, Eric Dickerson, and the entire New York Giants football team and management are thrilled at Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni’s decision to not play Barkley in Sunday’s game against the Giants. Eagles fans are not. Let the players play.

Fred Walker, Wyndmoor

I would like to suggest a couple of areas to be considered for scrutiny by the newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency: 1) Any staff required to travel in support of an elected official shall be required to receive and adhere to the published per diem rates. This is especially true for staff who are required to stay at a property in which an elected official owns a partial or full interest. 2) Taxpayer-funded security provided to an elected official and their immediate family shall only be provided while in office. Taxpayer-funded security should be terminated for family members once the elected official leaves office.

3) Priority should be given to scrutiny of federal contracts that benefit elected government officials, their advisers, and support staff. This is especially true for contracts benefiting all personnel supporting DOGE, including its directors. The impacts of cutting funding and personnel to federal contracts and/or agencies should be fully analyzed and reported before reductions are enacted. All potential conflicts of interest between DOGE staff and its decision-making need to be remediated prior to recommending and implementing any cost-cutting actions.

Fred Shapiro, Margate

In a recent article, two researchers explained two critical subtleties of Medicare that took me weeks of study to barely get to the bottom of: 1) If you go with an Advantage plan, you lose the ability to later force a supplemental plan to cover you, irrespective of your preexisting conditions. The technical phrase for that protection is called guaranteed issue, and I’ve told many people that, for this reason, the term open enrollment is a horrible deception and anything but open. They brilliantly highlight it as a one-way street, and it is a key decision factor that extremely few new enrollees could uncover, let alone articulate. 2) They explain the limitation on how much the supplemental plans can increase in cost, year by year: Once you are in, Medicare can’t raise your individual price based on your circumstances — it can only raise the price for everyone on its plan (based on general factors such as inflation). Supplemental plans, like drug plans and Advantage plans, are a consumer-hostile flavor of term insurance, in that they are one-year term plans; as such, understanding this subtle cost-capping fact is critical to choosing between supplemental or Advantage. All recent retirees would be wise to inform themselves thoroughly before they decide.

Jack Bellis, Wyndmoor, jackbellis@hotmail.com

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