This week, lawmakers in the House and Senate continued their work on an omnibus spending bill to fund the federal government through the remainder of the fiscal year. Lawmakers set a .07 trillion cap in the sweeping budget deal that they passed at the end of October, and now they have until December 11th just three weeks to outline how those funds will be spent..Seniors born from 1917 through 1926 often receive lower benefits than do other retirees with almost identical work and earnings records. Although reductions of about 10 percent for average earners was expected at the time of the changes, Notch babies were often affected by disparities of 20 percent or more, because a phase-in benefit formula failed..and if your drug plan doesn't cover it, or drops coverage, you may want to go.Fifty-six percent of all Social Security households pay taxes on their benefits. Many of them have very modest middle incomes and didn't adequately understand or plan for these taxes, which take about 6% on average of Social Security income..One way to strengthen Social Security is to do what's known as "scrapping the cap." Americans only contribute to Social Security on the first 7,200 in income earned every year. That makes no sense. Why should the very wealthiest get a tax break, when nurses, electricians, and grocery store clerks pay into the system on 100 percent of their earnings? Closing this loophole would extend the program for at least another generation..Legislation that would tie COLAs to an index that measures inflation experienced by older households, the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly, has recently been reintroduced. The CPI-E tends to grow more quickly that the CPI-W in most, but not every, year. "2021 is one of those times when gasoline prices soar and the CPI-W would yield the higher COLA," Johnson says. "If the COLA for 2022 were based on the CPI-E, we estimate it would be 5 percent compared to the 6.2 percent that we estimate for the CPI-W," Johnson notes. The Senior Citizens League works to protect and strengthen Social Security benefits and program financing..Keeping the U.S. drug supply chain secure, robust, and resilient is essential for the health and national security, and economic prosperity of the United States during emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic and for the provision of day-to-day health care..TSCL has been pushing members of Congress to include legislation to reduce the price of drugs and pass legislation to deal with the practice of surprise medical billing. We were hoping those issues would be addressed at the same time as the legislation to extend the federal health programs mentioned above..Each Agency on Aging provides a different list of services, but there are some basic services that are provided by nearly all. These include the following:
