Social Security ran a cash-flow deficit of $55 billion last year and one of its two trust funds, used to pay disability benefits, will go bust in three years, forcing benefits to be cut by 20 percent unless Congress acts, the program's trustees reported Friday.
When setting up Medicare as a parallel "earned-benefits" program to Social Security in 1965, Congress tacked onto the legislation — like an insurance rider - a secondary provision to help existing state programs provide medical assistance to a very small population: America's most helpless and destitute.
Much of the fight over illegal immigration isn't about immigration at all, but rather over the generous social safety net that has sprung up in the past five decades, and which has proved to be a major sticking point in voters' minds as Congress contemplates a legalization.
House Republicans released a draft bill Tuesday to repeal the ill-defined way physicians are paid under Medicare in a bid to finally end the annual Capitol Hill scramble to find extra cash to pay the doctors.
Imagine a deeply indebted household paying two companies to cut the same lawn, a shopper going to Costco and not buying bulk or a failing company paying billions to study itself.
This Memorial Day is punctuated by one other scandal in the Obama administration. The inability of the Department of Veterans Affairs to process disability and related claims of our nation's veterans in a timely manner is a shameful situation that may well add not only to anxiety among veterans, but even to the number of deaths of those who served their nation.
Representatives of "durable medical equipment" companies accused of badgering senior citizens into obtaining scooters and other equipment "at little or no cost to you" — with the rest picked up by taxpayers — hid from scrutiny by a Senate oversight committee Wednesday.
The economy is growing moderately and employment has picked up recently, but growth continues to be held back by budget constraints, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke testified Wednesday.
Dear Sgt. Shaft: Thank you for a most informative column. However, the more I read and the more I ask the question, I become more confused. So does my wife, in the matter of our health insurance cost after the age of 65.
