Nearly six million seniors currently owe extra Medicare premiums known as IRMAA surcharges, according to the Wall Street Journal — and that number is rising. But the quieter story, the one I found buried in a Facebook group for retirees on a Thursday afternoon in February 2026, belonged to someone who was not a retiree at all.
Curtis Patel is 25 years old. He sells real estate in Tampa, Florida, earns commission income that averages roughly $38,000 in a decent year, and he had not slept through the night since his mother’s Medicare statement arrived in December 2025. I spotted his post in the group — a careful, almost clinical breakdown of his mother’s 2026 benefit changes, asking whether anyone else was seeing the same math — and reached out by direct message. He agreed to talk the same day.
“I joined that group to learn,” Curtis told me when we connected by phone. “My mom doesn’t understand these letters. I’m the one reading them, and what I was reading didn’t make sense to me at first.”
A $35 Raise That Arrived $10 Short
Priya Patel, Curtis’s mother, is 67 and has been on Social Security Disability Insurance since March 2023, when degenerative disc disease forced her out of the hotel housekeeping work she had done for 22 years. Her monthly SSDI benefit is $1,248. The 2026 cost-of-living adjustment of 2.8% added approximately $35 to that — a number Curtis had penciled in weeks before the letter arrived, hoping it would soften rising grocery costs and utilities.
What he had not fully calculated was the Medicare Part B premium increase. As AOL Finance reported, Medicare Part B premiums rose to $185 per month in 2026, up from $174.70 in 2025 — an increase of $10.30 per month. For Priya, that consumed nearly 30% of her COLA gain before she could spend a dollar of it.
“I was actually excited when I told her the COLA number,” Curtis said. “And then two weeks later I’m doing the math and I’m like — okay, so we netted $24. That’s not going to cover anything.”
The arithmetic is blunt. Priya’s gross monthly income after the COLA sits at $1,283. Her Medicare Part B premium is deducted directly from that check. She nets $1,098 before any other fixed expenses. Curtis described watching that number and feeling a particular kind of helplessness — the kind that comes not from a crisis, but from a slow, structural squeeze.
The Full Cost of Being “Covered”
Priya’s Medicare situation was more layered than a single premium line. She enrolled in Original Medicare Parts A and B and pays separately for a Medigap Plan G supplement, which cost $189 per month when she enrolled in mid-2023 and has since risen to $214 per month. Her Part D prescription drug coverage — she takes three medications for her spine condition and blood pressure — adds $41 per month.
As Kiplinger explains in its Medicare basics overview, beneficiaries often underestimate total out-of-pocket costs when they add premiums across Parts B, D, and supplemental plans. For Priya, the combined monthly premium burden in 2026 comes to $440 — more than 35 cents of every dollar she receives in SSDI.
The Gap That Curtis Fills
Curtis transferred $3,900 to his mother across 2025 — roughly $325 per month on average. In the first two months of 2026, that number had already trended toward $420 per month as her costs climbed and one slow January in real estate left him working from a depleted savings cushion.
His own financial situation has fault lines that compound the pressure. His credit score sits at 584, damaged by a $1,800 medical bill that went to collections in 2022 during a gap between jobs when he was uninsured, and by a missed car payment in February 2024 when two real estate deals collapsed in the same week. That score makes emergency borrowing expensive and his margin thin in any month the commission calendar goes quiet.
Curtis had been paying $67 per month for a silver ACA marketplace plan under the enhanced subsidy program. When those subsidies lapsed, his premium jumped to $189 per month. He downgraded to a bronze plan at $112 per month — still a $45 monthly increase — with a $7,000 individual deductible. At 25, with a physically demanding schedule and no employer health plan, he told me he tries not to think about what happens if he gets sick.
“I’m a 25-year-old who feels like he’s planning for his own retirement and his mom’s retirement at the same time,” he said. “Except neither of us can actually retire.”
The Paperwork That Went Nowhere
Curtis is methodical in the way that people become methodical when chaos has burned them before. He keeps a spreadsheet tracking every transfer to his mother, every bill due date, every insurance renewal window. He updates it every Sunday night. When I asked how long he had been doing that, he said since his mother’s first hospitalization in 2022, before she was even on Medicare.
He had researched whether Priya might qualify for the Medicare Savings Program, a state-administered benefit under Medicaid as described by HHS that can help low-income Medicare beneficiaries with premiums and cost-sharing. A qualifying beneficiary can have their Part B premium — the full $185 — paid on their behalf. For Priya, that would have recovered more than five times her COLA gain.
She did not qualify. Her SSDI income fell within the threshold, but a savings account with $4,200 — money she had accumulated carefully over years of work — pushed her over Florida’s asset limit. Curtis said he spent two full Saturdays gathering documents and filling out forms before receiving the denial.
He also looked into whether Priya’s Medicare premiums could be deducted from her federal taxes. According to AARP, Medicare premiums can be deductible as a medical expense if a filer itemizes deductions and total medical costs exceed 7.5% of adjusted gross income. For Priya, whose only income is SSDI and who owes no federal income tax, the deduction provides no practical benefit.
What This Looks Like From the Inside
When I asked Curtis what he wanted people to understand about his situation, he paused long enough that I wondered if the call had dropped. Then he said something I keep returning to.
“I think people assume that because someone is on Medicare, their healthcare is handled. It’s not. It’s just a different set of bills with different names on them. And somebody is paying those bills. In our case, that somebody is me.”
He is not angry at his mother. He is not even particularly angry at the system, though he has specific thoughts about asset tests. What came through most clearly in our conversation was exhaustion — the particular fatigue of someone who has been doing careful math for years and keeps watching the variables drift out of reach.
Curtis told me he checks the Social Security Administration website the way other 25-year-olds check sports scores. He knows the 2026 COLA figure by heart. He knows what IRMAA stands for. He knows the Part D coverage gap thresholds. He learned all of it sitting at his kitchen table in Tampa, reading government PDFs at midnight, trying to figure out how to make the numbers work for someone he loves.
The numbers, as of March 2026, still do not fully work. He is still sending money. He is still updating the spreadsheet every Sunday. And he is still, most nights, not sleeping well.
Leave a Reply