• The spouse of a retiring worker may receive Medicare benefits based upon his spouse's eligibility.golden years image by Robert Kelly from Fotolia.com
  
  The spouse of a Medicare recipient is typically entitled to receive a certain amount of Medicare benefits themselves, depending on a number of factors, most important of which is the age of the spouses at the time they begin receiving benefits.
  
  

Eligibility for a Spouse

• As long as the working spouse is at least 62 years old and has worked for at least 10 years in Medicare-covered employment, his spouse is eligible to receive Medicare A and B upon reaching age 65 or full retirement age, as determined by their employment agreement. A spouse can receive up to 50 percent of the amount of the retiring worker's benefit amount. Also,It is possible for the spouse to claim benefits before reaching the full retirement age, but the amount of benefits will be permanently altered.
  
  

Benefits for a Spouse

• When a spouse start to collect his benefits before reaching the full retirement age, the amount of the spouse's benefit will be reduced by a percentage, based on the number of months before he reached retirement age. For example, based on a full retirement age of 66, if a spouse starts collecting benefits at age 65, his benefit would be about 46 percent of the working spouse's benefit. If he started collecting benefits at age 64, he would receive about 42 percent of the amount of the working spouse's benefit. If he starting collecting at ages 63 or 62, the benefit would be about 37.5 or 35 percent of the working spouse's benefit, respectively.
  
  

Effect of Spouse's Claim on the Working Spouse

• The retiring worker will not be negatively affected when the spouse makes a claim based on the retired spouse's employment. The benefits that the spouse will receive are not actually half of the retiring spouse's benefits, but an amount equal to half of the retiring spouse's benefits. As such, the retiring worker will receive his full amount of Medicare benefits, regardless of when the spousal benefits are claimed.