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benefits. If you're in a high-earning year, your earnings may help boost your.Congressional aides have said that the conference co-chairs, Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Paul Ryan, are "talking almost every day," but a partisan divide over potential "sequester" offsets seems to have halted progress. Half of the conferees hope to replace a portion of the "sequester" with revenue increases, while the other half would like to enact cuts to mandatory programs, including Social Security and Medicare. At this point, conferees on both sides are remaining steadfast in their positions..During the debate over the debt limit, you undoubtedly heard the President try to scare you into believing Social Security checks would not come. Let me be blunt. The federal government takes in nearly seven times more than it needs every month to pay Social Security checks. The money was there. If checks didn't come, it would have been because the President had chosen not to pay them. You did not read that wrong. If you had not received your Social Security payment, it was because the President has directed the Secretary of the Treasury not to pay it..Finally, one new cosponsor signed on to Rep. Allyson Schwartz's Medicare Physician Payment Innovation Act this week. Rep. Bob Filner announced his support, bringing the total up to twenty-eight..Hospitals, which are often the biggest employers in their localities, or even their states, have furloughed workers, and the industry lost an estimated billion a month in foregone surgeries and procedures during the worst part of the pandemic. Hospitals rely on elective surgeries for a major portion of their revenue, because Medicare and private insurers tend to pay more for those procedures than other types of hospital care. Hospitals say they also have lost money in treating COVID-19, because of the amount of intensive care that patients need..Medicare fraud, waste, and abuse costs about billion a year. What type of measures do you support to put a stop to this loss of Medicare finances?.Congress recently took action to head off a looming 19% cut in Social Security disability benefits received by nearly 10.8 million disabled adults and their dependents. The Social Security Disability Insurance trust fund was projected to run low of funds by the end of 2016, but changes contained in the recent debt limit budget deal include a number of provisions to strengthen program financing. Many of them had the support of TSCL..The chances are high that the next president of the United States will sign into law legislation that reforms the Social Security program and extends the solvency of the trust fund beyond 2034, its projected year of exhaustion. For years leaders in Washington have been authoring sweeping plans that would enact major benefit cuts like reduced cost-of-living adjustments or increased eligibility ages in order to strengthen the financing of the program. But the unpopularity of those plans with voters ensured those plans never went anywhere..A new study has found that it is more than prices that are high when it comes to so many prescription drugs. According to Modern Healthcare newsletter, "A .40 increase in out-of-pocket costs per prescription was associated with a 22.6% drop in consumption and a 32.7% increase in monthly mortality rates, an analysis of more than 358,000 relatively healthy 65-year-old Medicare beneficiaries found."