Senator Schumer declares war to protect Medicare. Let’s back him up and tell our elected representatives: Hands Off Medicare!
Call our legislative hotline: 1-800-998-0180.
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#politics #health care #chuck schumer #medicare #healthcare #seniors #older americans #elderly #retirement #retirees #retirement crisis #entitlements #entitlement reformMore you might like
House GOP Votes to Gut Medicaid, Weaken Medicare & Put Seniors’ healthcare at Risk
The National Committee strongly condemns the American Health Care Act (AHCA) just passed by the House, which needlessly puts the healthcare of millions of older Americans in jeopardy. “Despite the bill’s name, risking the health of our nation’s most vulnerable citizens to give the wealthy an $880 billion tax cut is tremendously uncaring — and does not reflect real American values…”
More on this issue via Entitled to Know.
May is Older Americans Month, but the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans are putting a serious damper on the celebration. Yes, candidate Trump promised not to touch Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
But his administration has been actively undermining those pledges. Budget Director Mick Mulvaney — who once called Social Security a Ponzi scheme — questioned the legitimacy of Social Security Disability Insurance — and wouldn’t promise a Presidential veto of legislation to privatize Medicare (a pet project of House Speaker Paul Ryan).
President Trump champions the GOP’s American Health Care Act, which guts
Medicaid, undermines the solvency of Medicare, and allows insurers to
charge older Americans up to five times as much as people in their 20s.
More on this issue here via The Hill.
President Trump’s budget hurts seniors. From cuts to Social Security and Medicare to vital services, his 2020 budget will devastate older Americans.
Read more about it by clicking here.
People over 65 who live alone were more likely to describe their health as excellent or very good than were seniors who live with others, according to a study exploring connections between older Americans’ health status and their living arrangements.
via Kaiser Health News.
Related Reading:
- The Case for Expanding Medicare: Hearing Loss – The Economic, Social and Medical Factors Impacting Healthy Aging.
- To remain cognitively and socially engaged with families, friends, and other individuals, seniors with a hearing impairment must have access to effective treatments to help reduce the incidence of social isolation, an important driver of morbidity and mortality in older adults.
- Numerous studies have demonstrated a link between hearing loss and social isolation.
Though Medicare is an essential part of retirement, pre-retirees continue to have misconceptions on how the federal program works.
Close to 90 percent of older Americans either enrolled in Medicare or plan to sign up for coverage, according to a recent survey from Nationwide Retirement Institute.
The insurer’s research arm worked with The Harris Poll to survey 1,007 adults over age 50 with a household income of at least $150,000.
More than 7 out of 10 participants said that they wish they better understood Medicare coverage.
via CNBC.
Related Reading:
Read more about Medicare by visiting our fast facts page by clicking here.
Older Americans are especially vulnerable to scams and identity theft, and Medicare is doing something about it. U.S. seniors will start receiving new identification cards next year as part of an effort to protect them from the rising risk of fraud.
But that is the only good news surrounding a sweeping federal initiative to bolster fraud defenses by reducing the widespread use of Social Security numbers as identifiers throughout the government.
Medicare cards use an identifier called the Health Insurance Claim Number (HICN) - but right now it is the same as your Social Security number. Starting in April 2018, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will be mailing new cards to enrollees that use a unique, randomly assigned number.
More on this issue can be found via Reuters.
Related Reading:
Here are some Medicare fast facts.
To maximize profits, private insurers in Medicare will continue to try
to enroll younger, healthier, low-cost enrollees leaving sicker, older
and higher-cost seniors in traditional Medicare, creating what is known
in the healthcare industry as a “death spiral” making traditional
Medicare too costly to sustain.
via Reflector.
Make no mistake: recent developments on the Hill should provide seniors with some sense of relief about the future of the programs they depend upon. But, as with an approaching storm whose course keeps changing, any sense of relief can only be temporary. Congressional conservatives’ attempts to gut Medicaid, privatize Medicare, and cut programs that benefit older Americans have been slowed, but not stopped.
Read more from this article via The Hill.
Do older Americans want bigger Social Security checks and expanded Medicare coverage – or do they want their benefits cut?
That is the fundamental question for seniors and their families with less than two weeks until the mid-term elections. The majority party in Congress has proposed time and again to slash Social Security and Medicare benefits under the guise of ‘entitlement reform.’ Leader Mitch McConnell just attributed the swelling federal debt to retirees’ earned benefits – when the real culprit was the 2017 tax package that mainly benefited the wealthy and big corporations.
The majority party’s 2018 and 2019 budgets would have taken a $500 billion bite out of Medicare and $64 billion from Social Security. And make no mistake – conservative tropes like raising the eligibility age, imposing a more meager inflation formula, and means testing are benefit cuts.
Read more from our op-ed by clicking here.
Investment in home and community-based care is popular and must be included in #infrastructure. Now it’s up to Congress to get it done. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/opinion/elder-care-congress.html #HCBS @nytimes