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For most Americans, the prices of essential prescription drugs are increasing far too rapidly for family budgets to sustain. Many Americans are being forced to choose between paying household bills and purchasing life-saving medications. The nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation issued a poll last October reporting that 77% of Americans - Democrats, Independents, and Republicans - identified the increasing prices of prescription drugs as their number one health concern.The American people are absolutely right..Split your pills if you can: You can further cut your costs in half by splitting your pills in half. Ask your doctor if pill splitting would work with your prescriptions. Your doctor would need to write a prescription with a dosage twice as high as you normally take. You can readily find inexpensive pill splitters at your pharmacy. If you do split your pills, make sure your family and emergency caregivers also know! Carefully label all prescriptions that require splitting..Federal law prohibits the two Social Security trust funds from borrowing or transferring payroll taxes from one program to the other without Congressional action. While such action has been taken 11 times in the past to temporarily avert a Social Security funding shortfall, a TSCL poll conducted in July of last year found that less than 1 percent of participants say that shifting revenues from one trust fund to another would be the best way to fix the program..You receive a call that instructs you to press a number on your telephone keypad to learn how you can receive a Medicare-covered back brace. A live agent comes on the line and asks for your personal information, including your name and Medicare number to determine if you are eligible. Fraudulent suppliers and providers steal your information and use your Medicare number to submit phony claims to Medicare, even if you never order a thing..That doesn't mean that a budget agreement is completely out of the question or the much more unlikely scenario that Congress won't get paid. The No Budget No Pay Act holds Congressional paychecks in escrow, and, by law, will release the funds either when a budget agreement is reached, or on the last day of the 113th Congress, which ends on December 31, 2014..But that's not all. Congressional Democrats also want to add dental, vision and hearing coverage to Medicare but that goal is running into resistance from powerful health industry lobbies..The compromise extends the tax holiday, unemployment benefits, and Medicare physician payments through the remainder of 2012..However, those projections were made prior to the severe economic downturn caused by the pandemic. Those funds will be affected both by the amount each program spends this year, and by the lower-than-projected revenue because of the depression-level unemployment. Those factors will not be determined until the end of this year. And until a vaccine or an effective treatment is found, the improvement in the economic outlook remains very uncertain..The good news is that key members of Congress now say they will push for surprise billing legislation to be part of the next bill that deals with the coronavirus emergency.