

News
-
Legislative Update For Week Ending February 8 2013
For more information, or to see if your Members of Congress have scheduled town halls before the November elections, call their local offices..For information about town hall meetings near you in the weeks ahead, call the local offices of your elected officials. For contact information, click HERE. .Some Medicare Advantage plans offer low cost dental insurance as an additional benefit. Before adding the coverage, always look into the details. Coverage can be very skimpy for the money, and you might be able to find better coverage for the same amount of money from a stand-alone dental plan. … Continued
-
S 469 Affordable Safe Prescription Drug Importation Act
Look into mail-order pharmacies. When ordering by mail you save money because you order in quantity – a 90-day versus a 30-day supply. Many mail order pharmacies charge lower co-pays for a 90-day supply than what you pay for a 60-day. Check with your drug plan to find out if mail order is available. .Enrollees in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans should take a careful look at changes in their health plan for 201These Medicare health plans have new leeway to offer new supplemental benefits. While some of the new benefits may be valuable to some families, other changes, which give plans greater leeway to "tier" the co-pay structure for healthcare providers, may mean higher out-of-pocket costs when non-preferred or out-of-network providers are used. .Many seniors are struggling with their vastly diminished retirement accounts following the stock market crash. Additionally, the inventory of unsold houses has now reached record highs and the forecasts for retirees who need to get their cash out of real estate are gloomy indeed. … Continued
(Washington, DC) – The tax bill being discussed in the U.S. House contains what may be only a fleeting benefit for middle class and older Americans, warns The Senior Citizens League. "The changes under consideration may provide some modestly lower federal income taxes at first, but the benefits for many people would be short - lived," says The Senior Citizens League's Social Security and Medicare policy analyst, Mary Johnson. "Older middle - income Americans could shoulder a disproportionate share of taxes under these changes, and get pushed more quickly into higher tax brackets than they are today," says The Senior Citizens League's Social Security and Medicare policy analyst, Mary Johnson. .Finally, one new cosponsor – Rep. Ted Yoho (FL-3) – signed on to the Social Security Fairness Act (H.R. 1795), bringing the total up to one hundred and seventeen. If signed into law, the bill would repeal the Government Pension Offset (GPO) and the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) – two federal provisions that unfairly reduce the earned Social Security benefits of millions of state and local government employees each year. .DeSantis' claim that airplanes have not been "vectors" for the spread of the coronavirus is untrue, according to experts. A "vector" spreads the virus from location to location, and airplanes have ferried infected passengers across geographies, making COVID-19 outbreaks more difficult to contain. Joseph Allen, an associate professor of exposure assessment science at Harvard University called airplanes "excellent vectors for viral spread" in a press call. .Larson will soon be reintroducing the Social Security COVID-19 Correction and Equity Act. This bill prevents an unintended and unanticipated cut to Social Security benefits for those affected; it also expands benefits for those who need it most during COVID who have faced long term systemic economic inequalities. .If you asked a Social Security recipient for a penny for their thoughts on next year's projected 0.2% cost of living adjustment, they could give it to you, but they'd only have .99 left. .Cutting the payroll tax permanently, which President Trump said he would seek to do if he is re-elected, would bring insolvency even closer and make the whole situation so much worse. .We can no longer kick the can down the road." .While there is no estimate of how large the cuts would be under the legislation that just passed, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a previous version of the Covid relief bill would have triggered about billion in cuts to Medicare in fiscal 2022 and between and billion from other mandatory programs. .Obama's new policy for illegal immigrants was recently announced and implemented without Congressional approval. Now questions are growing about the potential for widespread fraud — and with good reason, it seems. Less than two months after the government announced some 800,000 illegal immigrants would qualify for work authorization under the program, immigration policy analysts now say that more than twice that number, nearly 1.8 million, will qualify. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security appears to be accepting a surprisingly wide variety of evidence and supporting documents from applicants, hoping to prove that they qualify to stay in the U.S. and for temporary work authorization.