News

Rep. Rodney Davis.For more tips like these to save on your Medicare costs and to maximize your Social Security benefits, sign up for The Senior Citizens League's Social Security & Medicare Advisor newsletter here or call for more information..Social Security's combined Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance Trust Funds will be fully funded until 2035 one year later than was projected in last year's report. At that point, if nothing is done by Congress, Social Security would still have the funds to pay out 80 percent of scheduled benefits using tax revenues alone. The Trustees also estimated that Medicare's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will be fully funded until 2026, at which point the program would still be able to pay out almost 90 percent of scheduled benefits using tax revenues..Coming to Congress, just one year ago, I pledged to make rural healthcare a top priority. One of the first things I did was to join the Rural Health Care Coalition, a bi-partisan coalition committed to advancing rural priorities in health care policy in Congress. The first action we took this Congress was to introduce the Health Care Access and Rural Equity Act of 200The H-CARE Act is a comprehensive piece of legislation that makes important improvements to help rural healthcare providers address the challenges associated with delivering quality healthcare close to home..Social Security coverage to persons who have not worked long enough under the system to draw benefits on their own account is of major significance in the debate to allow individuals to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes into private retirement accounts. As proposed, private Social Security retirement accounts would unlikely be able to provide the extent of coverage the current program now offers..They also hope to include prescription drug price reductions in this legislation, something most Republicans have so far refused to support and which the drug industry is spending million in lobbying efforts to stop..Annual limits on out-of-pocket costs: Unlike Medigap supplements, MA plans have annual out-of-pocket limits, which can vary and rise annually. In 2016 the maximum annual out-of-pocket that plans can charge is ,700, so your costs would need to be that much before catastrophic coverage begins. On the other hand, the limit protects you in years when you have very high out-of-pocket costs. Medigap plans may have lifetime limits that you could potentially exceed as you get older and sicker..Reducing wait times. Inadequate funding and a growing hearing backlog have resulted in many DI applicants waiting longer than 600 days to be approved for the program. That's longer than some of them will live. All applicants deserve decisions on their benefit eligibility in a timely manner, and wait times of two years are simply unacceptable..A pending Totalization Agreement with Mexico could add more than 1.6 million Mexicans to the rolls and cost in excess of 7 billion by 2040 according to a new report released by TREA Senior Citizens League. The cost estimate, the first of its kind, was performed for TSCL to provide a more comprehensive picture of the impact a totalization agreement with Mexico would have on the fiscal solvency of Social Security.