Tag: Lindsey Copeland

Social Security Error Jeopardizes Medicare Coverage For 250,000 Seniors

By Susan Jaffe  | Kaiser Health News | June 6, 2019 | This KHN story also ran on 

At least a quarter of a million Medicare beneficiaries may receive bills for as many as five months of premiums they thought they already paid.

But they shouldn’t toss the letter in the garbage. It’s not a scam or a mistake.

Because of what the Social Security Administration calls “a processing error” that occurred in January, it did not deduct premiums from some seniors’ Social Security checks and it didn’t pay the insurance plans.

 [Continued at Kaiser Health News or NPR ]

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Lifting Therapy Caps Is A Load Off Medicare Patients’ Shoulders

Last month’s budget deal means Medicare beneficiaries are eligible for physical and occupational therapy indefinitely. Plus, prescription drug costs will fall for more seniors.

By Susan Jaffe  | Kaiser Health News | March 14, 2018 | This KHN story also ran on 

Physical therapy helps Leon Beers, 73, get out of bed in the morning and

Leon Beers gets help from caregiver Timothy Wehe. (Bert Johnson for KHN)

maneuver around his home using his walker. Other treatment strengthens his throat muscles so that he can communicate and swallow food, said his sister Karen Morse. But in mid-January, his home health care agency told Morse it could no longer provide these services because he had used all his therapy benefits allowed under Medicare for the year.

… Under a recent change in federal law, people who qualify for Medicare’s [physical, occupational and speech] therapy services will no longer lose them solely because they used too much. 

“It is a great idea,” said Beers. “It will help me get back to walking.” [Continued at Kaiser Health News,  NPR  and The Washington Post]

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Changes in the US tax system will also affect health care

Volume 391, Number 10117   
20 January 2018

 

WORLD REPORT    The tax overhaul pushed by Republicans could jeopardise the ACA’s health insurance marketplaces. Susan Jaffe, The Lancet’s Washington correspondent, reports.   

…The new tax law contains a provision aimed at an… administration target, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Next year, it eliminates the ACA’s tax penalty for Americans who disregard the requirement to have health insurance, one of the law’s most unpopular features. Even though the ACA’s health insurance mandate is still quite intact, Trump and others claim there is effectively no mandate without a penalty.
“When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means Obamacare is being repealed”, Trump said shortly before signing the tax bill into law last month. “And we’ll come up with something that will be much better, whether it’s block grants or whether it’s taking what we have and doing something terrific.”  [full story here]

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