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Your wife can sign up, when she's first eligible, during the 7-month period that begins 3 months before the month she turns 65 and ends 3 months after the month she turns 65.."Many older taxpayers probably did not even know they were getting a medical expense tax break for 2017, or this year," Johnson says. The 7.5 percent of AGI threshold was unchanged from what taxpayers age 65 and older paid in 2016, and before. That threshold, however, was formerly scheduled to rise to 10% of AGI in 201"Meanwhile taxpayers younger than 65 could only deduct medical expenses in excess of 10% under the former tax law, and so for that crowd it may have been noticed as a tax break," Johnson notes..When Congress enacted automatic Social Security COLAs in 1972, there was only one CPI and it measured the inflation experienced by urban wage earners and clerical workers. The 1972 amendments used this CPI as the basis for determining your COLA today. But today there are other, more appropriate indexes for calculating the COLA. In 1978 the Bureau of Labor Statistics expanded the CPI known as the CPI-U to cover all urban residents, including most retirees, and in 1983 the BLS launched an experimental index, the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly, which reflects the spending patterns of people age 62 and older..Investigate national and community charitable programs and organizations. An excellent guide to Prescription Drug Assistance Programs is available from The American Cancer Society. Even if you don't have cancer, the information is pertinent to all drug assistance programs. For more information call or download the publication..But according to a report in Politco last week, "… the administration's Medicare team has put together a revised plan - which was circulated inside the administration on Tuesday, with instructions to expedite approval - to start sending letters to 39 million beneficiaries within the next week, touting the drug-discount cards. The cards would then arrive across December and January, according to four officials with knowledge of the plan.".Committees Discuss Solutions to Opioid Epidemic.A controversial "Medicare" tax on net investment income that was signed into law shortly after passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act is expected to once again come under debate according to The Senior Citizens League. "During the battle over The Affordable Care Act, a new source of funding - a 3.8% Medicare Net Investment tax was enacted - presumably as means to strengthen Medicare funding," says Mary Johnson, a Medicare policy analyst for The Senior Citizens League. "But the truth is those revenues, which the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates to be .5 billion for 2021, never actually made it into the Medicare Part A Trust Fund," she says.".Are My Medical Expenses High Enough to Deduct From My Income Taxes?.On Monday, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office released its highly-anticipated report analyzing the AHCA legislation from Republican lawmakers that would replace the Affordable Care Act if signed into law.