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  • Congressional Corner Congress Must Start Making Rural Healthcare A Priority Feed

    Efforts to lower the cost of prescription drugs have been taking place at the state level as well as at the national level. This week the New Mexico legislature sent a bill to their Governor that aims to make the state among the first to work with the federal government on wholesale drug importation from Canada. States including Vermont, Maine, Colorado, and Florida have passed similar bills.
Backers said importing lower-cost drugs from Canada would help people who can't afford their prescriptions amid rising costs in the U.S. .Of particular importance is the portion of income that seniors and the disabled must spend on each particular category. Under the CPI-W, out-of-pocket medical costs are weighted or assumed to account for only 5.6% of total expenditures. National surveys indicate that Medicare beneficiaries spend far more. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that median out-of-pocket health care spending as a share of income for Medicare beneficiaries was about 16.2% by 2006. .In addition, your Social Security benefit is likely to be small anyway. When Social Security calculates the initial benefit, the amount of total earnings would be averaged over a 35-year (420 month) period to determine your average monthly earnings. While you become eligible with a little as ten years of earnings total, the SSA will still average your earnings over the 420-month period. This would produce a low average initial benefit amount. Then the WEP adjustment would reduce your initial benefit formula by scaling back the amount of average monthly earnings that would be credited toward your benefit. … Continued

  • Coronavirus Throws Monkey Wrench Into Cola Calculations

    No further information about the bill is available at this point but as soon as it is TSCL will review it to determine whether we will support it. .Johnson cautions, "The current inflationary trend may only be temporary, because prices today are compared with a big sudden drop in prices a year ago when the impact of COVID-19 first began to hit our economy." "The jump we see now is centered primarily on energy prices, but a number of other spending categories have stayed relatively flat," she says. .As prices increase, those who depend on Social Security benefits experience a decline in the buying power. In fact, according to my research, Social Security benefits have lost 30% of buying power over the past 20 years. For some retirees, that means a decline in their standard of living. … Continued

How do I go about contacting the Social Security Administration? .Doc Fix for Medicare Providers – Establish a permanent solution in order to bring greater stability to doctor reimbursements, ensuring continued access. .Second, in October, Congress passed legislation to strengthen Social Security's Disability Insurance (DI) program. Many of the recommendations that TSCL made to the House Ways and Means Committee back in August were signed into law, including provisions that will ramp up fraud prevention and test new work incentives for beneficiaries. Most importantly, the law prevents a 20 percent benefit cut that was scheduled to hit 11 million disabled beneficiaries in December 201A cut of that size would have been truly devastating for enrollees, and TSCL applauds Members of Congress for averting it. .If we get 100,000 signatures, we know that the President will hear our concerns because the White House will have to answer our petition. .The Social Security Administration maintains a special Earnings Suspense File of wage reports that don't match the name and Social Security number of those in Social Security records. According to data from the Social Security Administration, an average of 9,762,500 wage reports per year with invalid names or Social Security numbers were received from 2000 through 2007 for an average of .68 billion in wages per year. That much in wages would be worth more than billion per year in Making Work Pay tax credits in 2009 and 2010 if those trends continue. .It remains to be seen if Congress will go along with this plan. .The money that is withheld due to excess earnings is not completely lost. Once you reach full retirement age, the Social Security Administration will recalculate your benefits so that over time you can recover what was withheld. To learn more about getting Social Security benefits while working, visit: https://www.ssa.gov/planners/retire/whileworking.html. .The coronavirus pandemic has also raised a new issue of concern regarding the price of any new treatment or vaccine for the virus. Congress is pumping billions of federal dollars into research and efforts to spur the production of treatments and a vaccine for Covid-19 but there are no price controls as part of the effort. That means you will have already paid, in-part, for any new vaccine or treatment for the virus. .This week, four new cosponsors signed on to the Social Security Fairness Act (H.R. 1795), bringing the total up to one hundred and thirteen. The new cosponsors are: Reps. Michael Fitzpatrick (PA-8), Frank LoBiondo (NJ-2), Brett Guthrie (KY-2), and Katherine Clark (MA-5). If signed into law, the Social Security Fairness Act 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 teachers, fire fighters, peace officers, and other state or local government employees each year.