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In a letter that was sent to the twenty-nine conferees on Monday, members of the House Appropriations Committee wrote: "We call on the Budget conference to reach an agreement on the FY2014 and FY2015 spending caps as soon as possible to allow the appropriations process to move forward … If a timely agreement is not reached, the likely alternatives could have extremely damaging repercussions." According to the appropriators, the alternatives include: a government shutdown on January 15th, continued governance by continuing resolution, and a second round of across-the-board spending cuts via the "sequester," which is scheduled to hit in January..According to a March analysis of an earlier version of the bill by the CBO, the legislation would restructure Medicaid safety net by capping costs. "This would have a profound impact on low-income Medicare beneficiaries," Johnson says. About 1 in 5 people on Medicare, 11 million beneficiaries in all, have incomes so low that they qualify for Medicaid, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation..We have been hearing from hundreds of you who are watching the inflation numbers and eagerly looking forward to getting a high inflation boost next year. But a number of you point out an urgent problem that occurs when COLAs raise the income of people with lower incomes. The higher inflation boost can sometimes disqualify people of modest means from receiving low-income benefits such as food stamps or rental assistance..The base Medicare Part B premium that covers doctors and hospital outpatient services increased .00 in 201Overall healthcare costs are forecast to rise 7.5% this year - more than four times the amount of the COLA increase..Our voices and our votes collectively are how we counteract all the money the drug companies throw around to influence Congress..That is not as easy as it might seem but if they Senate is able to accomplish that whatever it passes must then go to a House/Senate conference committee which will have to come up with one bill that must then go back to each house and pass before it goes to the President for his signature. With just three work weeks left before October 1 it will have to be a marathon if they are to finish their work on time..This week, the Social Security and Medicare Trustees released their annual reports on the state of the trust funds, and one key bill gained critical support..From a tax perspective, your distributions from a traditional IRA or 401 are 100% taxable, while distributions from a Roth IRA or 401 are not taxable. Up to 85% of Social Security benefits may be taxable but, for many people, the taxable percentage is much lower..Efforts are quietly underway to lay the groundwork for a far-reaching fiscal deal that involves Social Security cost-of-living adjustments and Medicare benefits. White House officials and Senate Republicans have met in a series of private sessions in recent months. In his fiscal year 2014 budget, President Obama proposed reducing the growth in COLAs as well as raising Medicare premiums, reducing benefits of higher income seniors and increasing the Medicare eligibility age. Everything is still on the table, the pressure point being the debt limit. The government is expected to hit the debt limit ceiling the statutory borrowing limit - sometime this fall.