Medicare Watch articles are featured in a weekly newsletter that helps readers stay up-to-date on Medicare policy and advocacy developments, and learn about changes in Medicare benefits and rules.
Over the past few weeks, House and Senate Republicans have been meeting to work out the differences between their two tax bills. Recent reports indicate they have reached a deal on the final bill and plan to vote next week. If this timeline holds, the bill could be signed into law before Christmas. Legislative text has yet to be released, but here’s what we know so far about the final bill.
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.
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 Urge them to cosponsor the BENES Act and simplify the complicated and outdated Part B enrollment process.
As Congress moves quickly to send a tax bill to the President before the end of the year, the Senate is now closer to passing their version of the bill. The Senate cleared key process hurdles this week, passing their bill out of committee and passing a Motion to Proceed that allows the bill to be introduced on the Senate floor. Now Senators have a maximum of 20 hours of debate, plus a series of quick votes on an unknown number of amendments that various Senators may offer, known as “vote-a-rama.”
This week, the Medicare Rights Center joined with the AARP Public Policy Institute to release a new report, Consumer Protections in New Medicare Payment and Delivery Models: A Checklist. This checklist is the result of a partnership between Medicare Rights and the AARP Public Policy Institute in which we identified a set of concrete consumer protections that we believe should be integrated into the design of all Medicare models.
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:
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.
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.
As 2017 winds down, there are several smaller pieces of Medicare legislation, often called “Medicare extenders,” that must pass Congress to keep the program stable in 2018. Extenders establish programs for a short time, and have to be passed or funded by Congress every one to two years. Two extenders are particularly important to people with Medicare: the low-income outreach and assistance extender and the therapy cap exception extender. Both extenders will expire in December of 2017 if Congress does not act.
The House Republican tax plan is currently being debated by the Ways and Means Committee, and several of the provisions would have a devastating impact on older adults and people with disabilities. Most notably, the plan does away with the medical expense deduction, which allows people who spend more than 10% of their income on health care expenses to deduct the remainder of their medical expenses from their federally taxed income.
Medicare Rights, along with other organizations, sent a letter to congress urging them to protect this deduction. The letter highlights how this deduction helps people facing huge medical bills keep a bit more in their pockets–perhaps delaying enrolling in Medicaid, the state and federal program that covers healthcare and long-term care expenses for people with low incomes and limited assets.
Over the past few weeks, House and Senate Republicans have been meeting to work out the differences between their two tax bills. Recent reports indicate they have reached a deal on the final bill and plan to vote next week. If this timeline holds, the bill could be signed into law before Christmas. Legislative text has yet to be released, but here’s what we know so far about the final bill.
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.
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.
As Congress moves quickly to send a tax bill to the President before the end of the year, the Senate is now closer to passing their version of the bill. The Senate cleared key process hurdles this week, passing their bill out of committee and passing a Motion to Proceed that allows the bill to be introduced on the Senate floor. Now Senators have a maximum of 20 hours of debate, plus a series of quick votes on an unknown number of amendments that various Senators may offer, known as “vote-a-rama.”
This week, the Medicare Rights Center joined with the AARP Public Policy Institute to release a new report, Consumer Protections in New Medicare Payment and Delivery Models: A Checklist. This checklist is the result of a partnership between Medicare Rights and the AARP Public Policy Institute in which we identified a set of concrete consumer protections that we believe should be integrated into the design of all Medicare models.
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:
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.
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.
As 2017 winds down, there are several smaller pieces of Medicare legislation, often called “Medicare extenders,” that must pass Congress to keep the program stable in 2018. Extenders establish programs for a short time, and have to be passed or funded by Congress every one to two years. Two extenders are particularly important to people with Medicare: the low-income outreach and assistance extender and the therapy cap exception extender. Both extenders will expire in December of 2017 if Congress does not act.
The House Republican tax plan is currently being debated by the Ways and Means Committee, and several of the provisions would have a devastating impact on older adults and people with disabilities. Most notably, the plan does away with the medical expense deduction, which allows people who spend more than 10% of their income on health care expenses to deduct the remainder of their medical expenses from their federally taxed income.
Medicare Rights, along with other organizations, sent a letter to congress urging them to protect this deduction. The letter highlights how this deduction helps people facing huge medical bills keep a bit more in their pockets–perhaps delaying enrolling in Medicaid, the state and federal program that covers healthcare and long-term care expenses for people with low incomes and limited assets.
