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The age at which individuals become eligible for full, un-reduced Social Security benefits is rising. Your full retirement age is based on the year when you were born and, for people born in 1960 and later, the full retirement age is 6The earliest age at which you can claim a retirement benefit is 6However, claiming benefits prior to your full retirement age comes with expensive trade-offs. It's unlikely to be your best choice if your aim is to maximize your retirement income over the long haul..Redfield said the agency would continue to try and push the message that people should wear marks: "We're going to continue to try to figure out how to get more and more people to embrace it.".While you may be familiar with the problem of our government using a price index that reflects the inflation experience of younger workers rather than retired people over the age of 62, you quite likely have not heard very much about the specifics of how our government calculates price indexes. What the average person thinks of as a straight - forward mathematical calculation, the federal government can approach in convoluted ways..Even when you spend ,000 out-of-pocket, there are still out-of-pocket costs. At the catastrophic level of coverage there are smaller co-pays or 5% coinsurance, which can further lead to substantial out-of-pocket spending. In 2015, for example, Part D enrollees with out-of-pocket costs above the catastrophic threshold comprised just 2 percent of all enrollees, but their spending totaled 20 percent of enrollees' total out-of-pocket spending for the year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation..Here's a checklist of red flags to be concerned about:.Why did Dad get a bill for ,944 after his recent hospitalization due to COVID-19? I thought emergency legislation required coronavirus care to be covered by Medicare. Dad is enrolled in a large Medicare Advantage plan..Under current law, immigrants who work without legal authorization, but who later gain legal status, aren't prosecuted for using fraudulent or even stolen Social Security numbers. Those who kept evidence of earnings, like W2s, could later reinstate unauthorized earnings under a valid Social Security number and legally claim benefits based on those illegal earnings. Suspicious wage reports remain in the Earnings Suspense File until the Social Security Administration receives evidence to link the unidentified earnings to a valid work-authorized Social Security number..President Trump recently signed an executive order intended to change Medicare by expanding the role of Medicare Advantage - the private insurance alternative to Medicare. Medicare Advantage plans have been growing in popularity in recent years enrolling about one third of the nation's 61 million Medicare enrollees..A new study recently found that Social Security benefits have lost 34 percent of their purchasing power since 2000 due to rising costs and inadequate cost-of-living adjustments. Do you support the bipartisan CPI-E Act, which would make the COLA more fair and adequate?