Last week my 72-year-old father called me tearfully.
“They’re the ones cutting my checks,” he said, his voice shaking.
After 43 years on the job as a mechanic, his hands calloused and back permanently bent, he was staring at a benefits cut that would have left him weighing the cost of medication against that of food.
This is the new reality for millions of Social Security recipients come 2025 in the wake of substantial changes to the program that are beginning to take effect with little fanfare but huge implications.
There have been numerous changes to the Social Security Administration (SSA) that could make a substantial difference for retirees, leaving many vulnerable Americans to figure out how to balance even tighter budgets.
The most worrisome is a change in the calculation method of the Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA), which could result in hundreds or thousands of dollars less per average recipient in the next year.
My father isn’t alone.
Across kitchen tables all over the country, seniors are having tough conversations about how to stretch their waning resources even further.
The Hidden Math Change: A Cut to Benefits
The biggest change impacting Social Security recipients is a shift in the way the Cost-of-Living Adjustment is determined.
The SSA used to go with the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W).
Starting in 2025 but, they have switched to the Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (C-CPI-U).
This small technical change has big implications.
The C-CPI-U usually calculates lower inflation because it considers consumer substitution patterns — the idea that as prices increase, folks buy cheaper substitutes.
While this sounds reasonable on the surface, it does not take into account the fact that many seniors have non-negotiable expenses, such as prescription medications, that are not interchangeable.
Emma Reynolds, a retired teacher in Ohio who is 68, talked about how that impacts her day-to-day life.
“My arthritis medication is $237 a month with no generic.
When they cut my COLA, they’re acting like I can just go to something less expensive, but I can’t.”
That’s not how health care works for seniors,” she said at a community meeting I attended last month.
According to estimates, this alteration could cut the average retiree’s benefits by around $43-65 per month – or more than $500 a year.
For the roughly 40 percent of seniors who depend on Social Security for more than half their income, this cut is devastating.
Higher Medicare Premium Deductions Plant a Bite on Retirees
To make it worse for retirees, the premium for Medicare Part B rose significantly in 2025.
For most recipients, these premiums are deducted automatically from their Social Security benefits, leading to a double-whammy effect.
The average monthly premium soared from $174.70 for 2024 to $192.80 for 2025 — a 10.4% hike that far exceeds the paltry 2.5% cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) recipients received.
For William Jacobs, 77 and living in Memphis, Tennessee, this means his monthly check is this year smaller than last, despite the so-called “increase” from the COLA.
“I worked my entire life doing construction, I paid into the system for decades and now I’m making less money and everything costs more,” he told me while flipping through the statement of his benefits at the senior center where I volunteer.
“How is that fair?”
Medicare’s higher-income surcharges have also ballooned, now affecting more seniors, as the income thresholds for additional premiums haven’t kept up with inflation.
Now many retirees who don’t think of themselves as wealthy are confronting these added costs.
And the taxable portion of Social Security benefits has also gone up for many recipients at the same time, thanks to bracket creep — when inflation puts people in higher tax brackets even as their purchasing power hasn’t even changed.
“My clients who are getting shocked are doing so with the knowledge that more of their Social Security is taxable,” says Margaret Chen, a financial adviser with a focus on retirement planning.
The income thresholds for taxation haven’t been changed for inflation since the 1990s, so moderate-income retirees are getting hit harder.”
The burden that these changes place on seniors’ emotional health cannot be overstated.
In my visits to various retirement communities for this piece, I met many retirees who were anxious and depressed about their finances.
“At night, I lay in bed wondering if I’m going to become a burden to my children,” said Robert Kingsley, 70, a retired re-dedicated postal man.
“Having worked hard all my life, I never thought I’d be in this position.”
Some argue these changes would help stave off projected shortfalls in the Social Security Trust Fund before the end of the next decade.
But others wonder why it is current retirees who bear most of the pain, and who can’t change their retirement planning at this time.
“There were lots of ways to shore up Social Security that didn’t involve cutting benefits to current recipients,” says Dr. Eliza Montgomery, an economist who specializes in retirement security.
“This method places a higher value on the program’s accounting than on the real people the program was meant to protect.”
For those who are already receiving benefits, there is not much they can do to try to reduce the extent of these cuts.
Some seniors are going back to part-time work, but age discrimination and health constraints make this unrealistic for many others.
Others are shrinking homes or moving to less expensive regions — hard transitions late in life.
Community resources such as food banks have reported an increasing number of senior visitors, a disturbing trend that demonstrates the real-life consequences of these policy adjustments.
Local senior centers have been inundated with requests for help completing benefit applications and for financial counseling.
“We have seen a 32% increase in seniors seeking help with emergency financial assistance since these changes were announced,” says Diane Williams, director of a community aid organization in Phoenix.
When I saw my father meticulously cutting coupons last Sunday, methodically calculating how he could afford both his heart medication and enough food to get through the month, the human cost of these policy changes became painfully clear.
Social Security was founded to provide dignity and minimal economic security for American seniors.
These recent changes put that promise at risk for millions of retirees who played by the rules, worked hard throughout their lives, and paid into the system.
For anyone nearing retirement age, these trends are a real warning to prepare other sources of income, rather than just depending on Social Security.
For current retirees, community support systems and advocates offer an increasingly critical lifeline.
As we grapple with these painful changes to our nation’s retirement safety net, we must remember that behind every statistic and policy change are real people, our parents and grandparents, neighbors, and yes, ultimately ourselves, whose daily lives and dignity hang in the balance.