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adequate income, especially if you live to your 80's or 90's..Already Senate leaders are making in known that they won't get their work done on time again this year. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby said he's ready to move ahead with fiscal 2021 spending bills. But he told his subcommittee chairmen the Senate isn't likely to pass those measures until after the election, in December. Lawmakers expect to pass another stop-gap to prevent a funding lapse in September..My frail mother was in the hospital after passing out and falling. She stayed "in observation" for four days and received a number of tests for stroke, heart and circulatory problems. After discharge, her doctor said she needed nursing home care. The nursing home warned us that if mother's hospital stay was observation Medicare would not cover the nursing home stay. She has received several large bills for the hospital care. We can't afford to pay for this care out-of-pocket. Can you suggest anything?.An ongoing study of the buying power of Social Security benefits, a special project of TSCL, has found that, since 2000, COLAs increased Social Security benefits by a total of 46%, but the typical expenses of older households grew more than twice as fast - 96.3%. For every 0 a retired household spent in 2000, the same household can only buy about worth of goods and services today.."Sudden Price Spikes in Decades-Old Prescription Drugs," Testimony of Berna Heyman to the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, April 27, 201"High-Price Drugs Are Increasing Federal Payments For Medicare Part D Catastrophic Coverage," Daniel Levinson, Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, January 2017..Ten Questions For Your Next Town Hall.President Trump recently said that the United States has to create new bidding procedures for the drug industry. TSCL believes that new bidding procedures alone would not give Medicare the power to bring down prices on drugs when a company holds a monopoly on the only drug available to treat specific conditions. TSCL supports giving Medicare greater power to negotiate the price of drugs like it does for all other services covered under Medicare, and making it easier to import less expensive FDA approved drugs..A person receiving the national average Social Security benefit in 2000 - 6 per month - would have ,226.60 per month by 201However, because retiree costs are rising at a substantially faster pace than the COLA, that individual would require a Social Security benefit of 7.90 more per month, or ,634.50 in 2019, just to maintain his or her 2000 level of buying power..Then, in September, our entire country was appalled when a 32-year-old former hedge fund manager, Martin Shkreli, jacked up the price of Daraprim - a drug used to treat a life-threatening parasitic infection in people with suppressed immune systems like cancer patients and people with HIV/AIDS - from .50 per tablet to 0, overnight.