What Caused The Social Security Notch?.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..In a recent Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill questioned medical and pharmaceutical industry leaders about the financial relationship between physicians and drug companies. Pharmaceutical companies currently spend billions of dollars annually 90 percent of their marketing program on gifts, lunches, drug samples, and sponsorships of education programs for doctors without any form of public disclosure, leading many to question whether economic incentives provided by the industry cloud physicians' judgment and put profits ahead of patients.."These practices pose a risk of severe tissue damage and corrosive injury and should be strictly avoided," the CDC researchers wrote in a paper, published in the agency's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. "Although adverse health effects reported by respondents could not be attributed to their engaging in high-risk practices, the association between these high-risk practices and reported health effects indicates a need for public health messaging regarding safe and effective cleaning practices aimed at preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission in households.".On Monday evening, Senator John Cornyn told reporters that the Senate's bill would include major differences from the House version. He said: "We're going to start from scratch, really. It's helpful for us to have [House lawmakers] go first to see the kind of issues that come up and anticipate those in the Finance Committee markup. But I'm still pretty optimistic we'll get this done before Thanksgiving.".The panel discussed the following options for strengthening Social Security, among others: updating the benefit formula for low-income workers, modifying the annual cost-of-living adjustment to make it more accurate, increasing survivors' benefits, and creating caregiver credits for those who support aging parents. However, the focus of Wednesday's hearing seemed to be on addressing the insolvency of the Social Security Disability Insurance program..Rather than get into all the details of how this works, we will simplify it this way. The Democrats now have the majority in the Senate because Vice President Harris can break tie votes, giving a majority vote of 51 to the Democrats..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..On Wednesday, the Social Security and Medicare Trustees released their annual reports on the financial outlook of both programs. As expected, they found that Social Security and Medicare are experiencing long-term financing shortfalls. Social Security's combined trust funds are expected to be depleted in 2034, which remains unchanged from last year's report. Medicare's Hospital Insurance trust fund is expected to be depleted in 2028 two years earlier than the trustees projected last year.
