Blog New Hampshire Abolishes Capital Punishment On Legislatures Veto OverrideUnder current law the Social Security COLA is calculated based on the spending patterns of younger working adults using the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers. But older consumers spend a bigger portion of their household budgets on healthcare and housing, two categories that have been increasing more rapidly in recent years. "Medicare Part B premiums are the fastest growing cost most retirees will ever have," notes Johnson. "But those costs are not even surveyed under the CPI-W or reflected in today's COLA," she says..There was no Cost of Living Adjustment, or COLA, applied to Social Security benefits for 2011, and that may cause great concern for senior citizens and those who care for them. This will leave 54 million beneficiaries who receive a Social Security check each month without an increase..I lay my car keys on the table, put the junk mail in the trashcan under the table and notice that the can is full. … Continued
Tag Mental HealthA 2004 law forbids the payment of Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants in the U.S. unless they receive legal work authorization at some point. The scope of that law appears much more vague under Totalization. It appears that illegal Mexican workers would only need to return to Mexico to file a claim for benefits. Under current policy, once a worker becomes eligible for Social Security, the U.S. Social Security Administration determines entitlement based on all earnings, even from jobs worked illegally..According to economist John Haldi, Ph.D., who performed a comprehensive analysis of the Notch in 2003, "The result of their formula should have been re-examined years ago to see if it achieved a basic level of fairness, but all prior reviews seem to have been designed to minimize and dismiss the problem, rather than recognize and remedy it. The factors that led to the Notch need to be reviewed again.".The suppressed growth in Social Security benefits not only creates ongoing benefit adequacy issues for retirees, but also Medicare budget problems when the COLA is not sufficient to cover rising Part B premiums for large numbers of beneficiaries. When the dollar amount of the annual Medicare Part B premium increase is greater than the dollar amount of an individual's annual cost of living adjustment, the Social Security benefits of about 70 percent of Medicare beneficiaries are protected by the hold-harmless provision in the Social Security Act. The Medicare Part B premium of those individuals is reduced to prevent their net Social Security benefits from being lower than the year before. … Continued
