Medicaid Behavioral Health Services Psychiatric Services EvaluationChanges are looming for Medicare and Social Security. Make your opinion count. Take the monthly poll on TSCL's homepage. We'll announce the results in upcoming issues of this newsletter..The following Members of Congress, among many others, will be holding town hall meetings in the days ahead: Reps. Diana DeGette, Lynn Jenkins, Gary Palmer, Tom Rice, Todd Rokita, Steve Cohen, David Valadao, Steve Womack, Susan Brooks, Randy Hultgren, Lamar Smith, Eric Swalwell, Marc Veasey, and Rep. Ed Perlmutter..Meditation and yogNew research has found that mindfulness meditation can actually change the structure of the brain - in a very protective way. Just a couple of weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction training, developed by the University of Massachusetts' Center for Mindfulness, improves concentration and attention since strong focus of attention is one of the central techniques. Meditation training has long been used as a technique for reducing blood pressure, stress and anxiety and also has helped people quit smoking by learning to "decouple" the state of craving from the act of smoking. … Continued
Blog Statevote C68 2On Wednesday, lawmakers on the Senate HELP Committee held a courtesy hearing to question Representative Tom Price, a Congressman from Georgia and an orthopedic surgeon who has been nominated to fill the position of HHS Secretary. Both the Social Security Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services fall under the jurisdiction of HHS, and the agency has one of the federal government's largest budgets at trillion..The Obama Administration recently opened the "illegals may apply" window at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Even before the government started accepting applications, estimates of those expected to qualify, more than doubled from the original government projections released just two months earlier. Nearly 1.8 million illegal immigrants under the age of 31 could become eligible. As details emerge, TSCL is concerned that the program is far broader than early announcements suggested..President George W. Bush proposed overhauling Social Security into a system of private accounts that would be invested in the stock market. The proposal never was passed into law, due to its unpopularity with the public. Before the proposal could gain traction, the Great Recession pounded the stock market, bringing a temporary end to the idea of investing Social Security payroll taxes into private individual retirement accounts. Between the peak of the stock market on October 9, 2007 and the low in March 2009, equity prices fell 50 percent, proving to many that the fixed benefit structure of Social Security is still desirable. … Continued
