News

According to a report in Bloomberg Government News, "Centrist Democrats in the House are pushing to shrink their party's health-care wish list to focus more on low-income Americans, a move backed by industry groups including dentists who say a narrower focus is better policy..One new cosponsor Rep. Michael Michaud signed on to Rep. Peter DeFazio's Consumer Price Index for Elderly Consumers Act this week. The cosponsor total for this bill is now up to 29..The spending bill now moves to the Senate, where its future is uncertain. Leaders are not sure that they will have the votes needed to pass the bill in its current form, and many are predicting that the President will end up signing a "clean" spending bill into law at the end of February..Addressing the Part A shortfall will be particularly difficult and contentious for everyone. To bring greater solvency to the HI trust fund, lawmakers will be faced with the politically unpalatable choices of reducing Medicare spending, which could include requiring that Medicare recipients pay more for their coverage and increasing the tax revenues received by Medicare. Congress last addressed Medicare Part A finances in the 2010 Affordable Care Act which, among other things, required hospitals to become more efficient in their delivery of care, while requiring that higher income workers pay a higher Medicare payroll tax rate..According to AARP, about 94% of widely-used brand-name drugs that were on the market between 2005 and 2017 nearly doubled in price. And in 2017, the average annual cost of specialty drugs - which treat complex conditions like cancer - was about ,800. In contrast, the average Social Security benefit in 2017 was just ,800.."The new aspect of this study of memory loss in the elderly is that it examines silent strokes and hippocampal shrinkage simultaneously," said study author Adam M. Brickman, PhD, of the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University Medical Center in New York..Early in the summer, I spent an afternoon at one of two critical access hospitals in my district in Southeastern Ohio. It's a hospital with just 25 beds and an Emergency Department no larger than many families' kitchens. Still, every year the doctors and nurses there care for more than 2,000 inpatients and treat an astonishing 50,000 outpatients..Through 2012, annual COLA increases have been tied to the increase in the consumer price index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers. Deficit reduction plans would switch to a more slowly-growing CPI known as the "chained" CPI to determine COLAs. Traditional CPIs measure the increase in prices. But the chained CPI doesn't. It measures consumer spending when prices go up. For example if the price of beef goes up, it assumes people switch to less costly choices, like chicken. The chained CPI measures inflation as growing less slowly than traditional indexes..Currently, because the Trust Funds are a part of the unified federal budget, Congress regularly uses the "excess funds" those not immediately needed for purposes other than to pay out benefits. TSCL believes that this practice is fundamentally unfair to current and future beneficiaries, and because both programs are facing insolvency within the next two decades, we believe it is now more important than ever for Congress to end the irresponsible practice. TSCL enthusiastically supports the Social Security and Medicare Lock-Box Act, and we look forward to working with Congressman Walberg in the coming months to help build support for it.