People with Medicare face significant health risks because they do not have access to medically necessary dental care. There is an ongoing effort to urge CMS to use their existing administrative authority to allow this coverage, and we need your help!

Ask your members of Congress to sign on to letters asking CMS to provide Medicare coverage for medically necessary dental care, as authorized by law.

This week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) expanded the time-limited equitable relief opportunity to people who are enrolled in Marketplace plans but could have enrolled in Medicare Part B during their Special Enrollment Period (SEP), which was available to them after they lost their or a spouse’s job-based insurance.

The report, Medicare Trends and Recommendations: An Analysis of 2016 Call Data from the Medicare Rights Center’s National Helpline, re-examines the top three issues heard on Medicare Rights’ helpline in prior years. Each issue is demonstrated through clients’ stories heard on the helpline, which the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), state agencies, insurers, elected officials, and other stakeholders can use as a basis to strengthen the Medicare program for the more than 58 million people it serves.

A bipartisan bill reintroduced in Congress—the Beneficiary Enrollment Notification and Eligibility Simplification (BENES) Act—would improve the Part B enrollment process. Through better notice, eliminating gaps in coverage during enrollment periods, and more, the BENES Act modernizes enrollment rules written when Medicare was created more than 50 years ago.

Medicare Rights strongly supports the BENES Act. Help us support this bill by writing to your members of Congress. Urge them to cosponsor the BENES Act and simplify the complicated and outdated Part B enrollment process.

This week, the Senate and the House are frantically working out the differences between the tax bill previously passed in the House and the Senate’s version that passed late last week.

Both bills would add over $1 trillion to the debt, putting our nation’s bedrock programs—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—in the cross-hairs of lawmakers who plan to use rising deficits as an excuse to “restructure” or “reform” these programs by gutting them.

Take action today. Write to your members of Congress, and tell them to put a stop to this deeply unpopular tax bill.

As families around the country prepare to gather with loved ones for the Thanksgiving holiday, the House passed a tax bill that would threaten the health and economic security of many low-income and middle-class families.

This Thanksgiving, talk turkey about taxes! It’s not too late to protect our health care and our families. Here’s what you can do:

As the House and Senate rush to make changes to their versions of the tax bill, it keeps getting worse and worse, posing an immediate threat to the Medicare program and health care coverage for 13 million Americans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the enormous cost of the tax bill would prompt immediate, automatic, and ongoing spending cuts to Medicare – $25 billion in 2018 alone.

According to a new issue brief by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), one million people with Medicare Part D had drug costs above the catastrophic limit in 2015. On average, they spent $1,251 after they hit the catastrophic limit and more than $3,000 total on their prescriptions for the year. While Part D helps bring down the drug costs for people with Part D, many are still exposed to high drug costs. This is because Part D does not place a cap on how much people can spend out of pocket on their drugs.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced a year-long extension, through September 30, 2018, of a critical exception for certain Marketplace enrollees who delayed or declined Medicare enrollment. This process—known as time-limited equitable relief—lifts the burden of lifetime late enrollment penalties and gaps in health coverage for people with Marketplace plans who mistakenly missed signing up for Medicare.