This week, President Obama released his fiscal 2015 budget blueprint. In addition, The Senior Citizens League's (TSCL's) Board of Trustees traveled to Capitol Hill to meet with four lawmakers and their top aides, and TSCL saw . .Likewise, AstraZeneca, a top competitor, has received a BARDA promise of up to .2 billion for commercializing a product derived from research at the University of Oxford. .The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the number of beneficiaries that will be required to pay the increased Medicare premiums will almost triple over the next decade rising from five percent of beneficiaries in 2011 to 14 percent in 2019 due to the expansions of "means testing" in the PPACA. By 2019 one out of every five new enrollees will have to pay higher premiums. The Senior Citizens League strongly opposes the "means test" and supports efforts to repeal it. To learn more, please visit . .TSCL agrees with members of the subcommittee and we share their concerns about fraud within the DI program. We feel strongly that the federal government must administer the necessary oversight to ensure that scarce program dollars are being spent properly. In the months ahead, we will continue to advocate on Capitol Hill for fraud prevention and for the administrative funding needed to make meaningful progress. .The Inspector General's Office recently surveyed 4 field Social Security field offices along the border with Mexico in California and Texas. Each office provided services to about 1,000 such beneficiaries every month. Personnel say the number is increasing for three reasons: .A deductible is the amount of money you must pay before your coverage starts. Many Medicare supplements (Medigap policies), Medicare Advantage plans, and drug plans cover Medicare's deductible as part of the coverage you purchase. Medigap polices "B" through "J" pay the Part A dedictible, and Plans "C", "F" and "J" also cover the Part B deductible. Medicare Advantage Plans and prescription drug plans may or may not have a yearly deductible depending on the type of plan you choose. There are also federal and state government programs for low-income seniors that provide assistance for this cost. .Do COLAs overpay seniors? Ask TSCL Chairman, Larry Hyland. "The idea is hogwash," he says. "There's simply no evidence that the CPI has overpaid the people who depend on those COLAs to protect the buying power of their benefits. The Consumer Price Index for the Elderly (CPI-E) that surveys the market basket more typical of the majority of Social Security recipients, has shown a significantly greater rise over the CPI used to calculate COLAs through 201The CPI-E would provide a more accurate, and adequate COLA, one more in line with the costs experienced by seniors," Hyland says. .Virtually all of the changes tend to show inflation as growing more slowly. Independent economist John Williams believes that the combined effect understates the measured rate of inflation by an astonishing 7 percentage points. One of the clearest illustrations of the impact of a major change is seen in the following chart of COLAs between 1976 and 1987. .This tax season is likely to be more uncertain for taxpayers of all ages due to the impact of COVID-19 on business closures, loss of income from earnings and wages, a temporary waiver of minimum distributions from retirement accounts, high medical costs for some people, confusion over tax treatment of working from home, and how stimulus payments and program benefits such as unemployment should be treated for tax purposes.