Grassroots lobbying is perhaps the most effective way to let YOUR Representative and Senators know your opinion. Whether you are calling into a local or Washington, D.C. office; sending a letter or e-mail; signing a petition, or making a personal visit, Members of Congress are the most receptive and open to suggestions from their constituents..Compare your drug and health plan options during the Medicare Open Enrollment period October 15th - December 7th. Does your current drug plan cover expensive new prescriptions? If not, you need to check your other options. Chances are another plan will. Use the Drug and Health Plan Finder at. Make sure you carefully enter every prescription drug you take in order to get a custom comparison of your best drug plan choices. Costs can vary by hundreds, even thousands, of dollars, and you may be very surprised by the savings from switching to a better plan. You can get unbiased help to compare your coverage. Call your Area Agency on Aging and ask for the help of a State Health Insurance Assistance Program counselor, or visit online..Was your surgery for an inpatient or outpatient procedure? Even when you spend one or more nights in the hospital, that doesn't automatically make you an inpatient. Ask your hospital or facility's billing department. Whether the service is provided as an inpatient or outpatient is important, because it will be billed differently. If your elective surgery was an outpatient procedure and your anesthesiologist billed it as an inpatient service, or vice versa, then Medicare or your health plan may reject the bill. If an error was made, ask your anesthesiologist to correct the bill and resubmit it..The average Social Security benefit today is only ,240 a month. That's only 25% above the federal poverty level. More than one -third of all recipients depend on Social Security for 90% of their retirement income..TSCL enthusiastically supports H.R. 155, H.R. 1029, H.R. 574, and H.R. 1795, and we were pleased to see support grow for each of them this week.."But the evidence on whether Biogen's treatment, called aducanumab, is effective is, at best, mixed; the FDA approved it this week over the objections of its own advisory committee. And with a preliminary announced price of nearly ,000 annually per patient, covering the treatment could cost upward of 0 billion a year, mostly to Medicare, which would almost double the program's drug spending. Patients themselves could be on the hook for thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs.".TSCL understands that the budget deficit is growing out of hand. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the massive tax reform and budget bills recently adopted by Congress will cost the federal government an estimated .7 trillion over the next ten years. However, TSCL firmly believes that a constitutional balanced budget amendment, that would disproportionately impact seniors and limit the ability of Congress to respond to economic downturns, is not the solution to the problem.."Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, health care professionals will reportedly spend less time filling out paperwork and more time focusing on delivering the best care for patients," said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius..This week, lawmakers in the Senate voted to approve a permanent repeal of Medicare's flawed sustainable growth rate formula, and The Senior Citizens League announced its support for one new piece of legislation.
