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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..Distributions from your 401 are different. If you paid into the 401, you can exclude part of each payment you receive from taxable income as a recovery of your investment. Your total investment cost includes everything you paid and also includes amounts your employer contributed that were taxable to you when paid. But like all things having to do with taxes, the IRS has pages of mind-bending rules and instructions about how you determine the taxable portion of your distribution..In making the 1977 changes, Congress, wanting to avoid an abrupt change, allowed persons born from 1917 through 1921 to use a special transitional benefit formula or the new 1977 formula, whichever would yield the higher of the two benefits. The transition benefit formula never delivered the promised benefit protection, however, because it did not yield a higher benefit amount. Instead, the new benefit formula most often yielded the higher amount..TSCL opposes these new provisions because we feel strongly that seniors should not be required to cover the cost of the poor policy-making decisions that were made by Congress nearly twenty years ago, when lawmakers first created the SGR. According to the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicare beneficiaries will automatically contribute billion in Part B premiums over the next decade to repeal and replace the SGR. TSCL believes any additional cost-sharing including the two new provisions will be unduly harsh..Never allow anyone into your home to check electrical wiring, natural gas pipes or appliances unless you have scheduled an appointment or have reported a utility problem. Also, ask utility employees for proper identification..Recently we asked for your stories and comments on how rising prescription drug costs impact you. The following story illustrates new administrative efforts by Medicare to "educate" beneficiaries about their options for less expensive prescription meds, by sending out letters listing lower cost medications. The question we need to ask our lawmakers is why is this necessary? Does the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services believe we are impoverishing ourselves by using more expensive drugs if a less expensive alternative was effective, to begin with? Unfortunately, sometimes the older, less expensive drugs don't work as well, and with metastatic cancer drugs, quality of life can be at stake. Our sincere thank you to Janice S. a retiree living in Illinois, for sharing the following..Last year the Senate was a bigger problem when dealing with passing legislation but there still may be hope this year for a bi-partisan bill authored by Senators Ron Wyden and Chuck Grassley. "The bill would cap seniors' drug costs and penalize drugmakers for raising prices too fast - a provision that many Republicans have likened to price controls. It would save the government a projected billion over a decade, far less than the 0 billion-plus under the House negotiation bill," according to Politico..The OIG did not estimate the amount that the 11,179 collected in benefits in 2014, no doubt because privacy laws prevent the Social Security Administration from sharing that information. TSCL's Social Security policy analyst and Advisor editor Mary Johnson, however, estimates that this group of auxiliary beneficiaries may have received more than 5 million in benefits in 2014, based on current Social Security statistical data. TSCL agrees with the OIG, and believes that with Social Security in deficit, the Social Security Administration must do more to prevent improper payments..In 2012, the GPO reduced by two-thirds the Social Security benefits received by nearly 600,000 surviving spouses who also collect a government pension. Nine out of 10 public employees affected by the GPO lose their entire spousal benefit, even though their spouse paid Social Security taxes for many years.