The Social Security COLA is calculated using the consumer price index. There are several of them, and the government uses the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Workers (CPI-W) to calculate the annual boost. That index, though, doesn't measure how people 62 and older spend their money. It measures how younger working adults do. Seniors, however, have different spending patterns, and have to spend a growing share of their budget on healthcare, which in most years outpaces overall inflation. .The Social Security Safety Dividend Act (H.R. 67), introduced in the House by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (TX-18), would give Social Security beneficiaries a 0 payment during years in which no cost-of-living adjustment is payable. If signed into law, it would provide much-needed financial support to older Americans in years like 2016, when there was no COLA. In a letter of endorsement, Art Cooper – TSCL's Chairman – wrote: "Years of record-low COLAs will have a devastating impact on the long-term adequacy of Social Security benefits for more than 59 million beneficiaries … Your bill would go a long way in ensuring the retirement security older Americans have earned and deserve." .How Can We Cope With Debt In Retirement? .Of the 20 CEOs, annual income not taxed for Social Security totaled 1,545,322 and averaged ,077,266 per CEO. .It's not what the government tracks that causes your Social Security cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) to grow so slowly. It's what the government isn't tracking that's keeping your COLAs so low. It may surprise you, as it did us at TSCL, to recently learn that COLAs are calculated using methodology that doesn't directly measure what you pay out-of-pocket for health insurance premiums. Add to that the fact that the consumer price index (CPI) the government uses to calculate COLAs (CPI-W) represents the spending habits of younger urban wage earners and clerical workers — or the spending habits of only 29% of the U.S. population. That's certainly not going to reflect the inflation experienced by most Social Security recipients. .The Post story said that labs struggled to ramp up coronavirus testing, and hospitals and nursing homes ran short of personal protective equipment over the spring. These failures hampered the national and state responses to the pandemic, leaving the United States with far more infections and deaths than any other country. Even now, shortages of protective medical gear are looming as outbreaks grow in the South. One big reason is because these supplies often come from other countries, which were also dealing with outbreaks. .The new benefit formula under the 1977 law changes used "wage indexing" to calculate the initial retirement benefit. The economic assumptions used by Congress and the Social Security Administration assumed that wages would grow more quickly than price inflation. Generally, this is the way the economy tends to perform under normal circumstances. In reality, however, the reverse happened. .The total cost for a single year of treatment with the nation's most expensive specialty drugs can cost more than the entire retirement savings for many retirees. The annual cost of the cancer drug Idhifa, for example, is 0,85According to a new study by the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation, the median out-of-pocket cost that Medicare Part D beneficiaries will pay out-of-pocket for specialty drugs in 2019 would be ,55Patients suffering from multiple sclerosis could pay an estimated out-of-pocket of ,409 in 2019 for Glatiramer acetate. Even on the "low side," the annual out-of-pocket for Hepatitis C drug, Zepatier runs ,622. .Both Social Security and Medicare have come under intense scrutiny for benefit cuts in recent years of deficit reduction negotiations. Immigration proponents say that immigration reform would boost the payroll taxes flowing to both programs and prolong program solvency. Critics, including TSCL, say that giving hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants new access to Social Security would boost long-term costs far more than the 2-year estimated gain in solvency that the Social Security program would receive. Under current law the government continues to calculate entitlement and the amount of the initial benefit based on all earnings, even for jobs worked under invalid or even fraudulent Social Security numbers prior to gaining legal work authorization.