On Tuesday, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education approved a 6.8 billion fiscal 2015 spending bill by a voice vote. The bill provides funding to a wide range of health and education programs, and it also covers the administrative expenses of Social Security and Medicare. The Labor-HHS-Education bill is the largest domestic appropriations bill, accounting for nearly one-third of all non-defense discretionary spending..When the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services establish the Part B premium for 2022, they could potentially factor in the expected costs for Aduhelm. Part B premiums were already on track to be higher. The Medicare Trustees recently estimated that Part B premiums would increase to 8.50 in 2022..Let's be clear about this. No one is saying that the effort to cut Medicare and/or Social Security will come this year or next..Practice using the tool: Have your Medicare number, information about your current coverage, and a complete list of prescription drugs, including dosages and the number you need per month at hand. The Plan Finder will ask you to provide information including your zip code, current Medicare coverage, the drugs you take, the pharmacies you plan to use, and whether you want to see just Part D stand alone plans or Medicare Advantage plans or both. For meaningful results accurately enter all your prescriptions. When complete get your Drug List ID number, print it out and save it. You don't want to enter it again every time you revisit the Plan Finder and invariably you will..The Senior Citizens League encourages its supporters to attend these events and to ask important questions of their elected officials, like the following four….A divorce can throw a monkey wrench into retirement plans, especially for women whose earning records may have fewer work years and at lower earnings than their former spouses. Understanding your options can help you maximize your Social Security benefit and live a more secure retirement. Here are the four main eligibility rules to qualify for a benefit based on the work record of an ex-spouse:.Increasing the payroll tax cap. Currently, the amount of earnings subject to payroll tax is 7,200, and the Social Security payroll tax is not applied to annual income over that amount. In a recent survey of TSCL's members, 73% said they would like to see the 6.2 percent payroll tax applied to all earnings in order to increase the solvency of the program..TSCL enthusiastically supports Rep. Garamendi's CPI-E Act, and we thank him for his leadership on this important issue. In the months ahead, we look forward to working with his office to build support for the bill. In the meantime, we urge our members and supporters to contact their elected officials to request their support for H.R. 125For contact information, click HERE..Legislation that would tie COLAs to an index that measures inflation experienced by older households, the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly, has recently been reintroduced. The CPI-E tends to grow more quickly that the CPI-W in most, but not every, year. "2021 is one of those times when gasoline prices soar and the CPI-W would yield the higher COLA," Johnson says. "If the COLA for 2022 were based on the CPI-E, we estimate it would be 5 percent compared to the 6.2 percent that we estimate for the CPI-W," Johnson notes. The Senior Citizens League works to protect and strengthen Social Security benefits and program financing.
