JustCare

Category: Social Security

  • Majority of voters more likely to back candidates who support lower drug prices, expanding Social Security and Medicare

    Majority of voters more likely to back candidates who support lower drug prices, expanding Social Security and Medicare

    A new Public Policy Polling poll for Social Security Works should send a strong message to Congressional candidates. It shows that registered voters are significantly more likely to back candidates who support lowering prescription drug prices and expanding Social Security and Medicare.

    More than eight in ten (84%) said they are more likely to back candidates who support taking federal action to lower prescription drug prices. Just over one in ten voters (11%) said they were less likely.

    Two-thirds (66%) are more likely to back candidates who support expanding and increasing Social Security benefits. Less than two in 10 (18%) are less likely.

    Nearly two-thirds (64%) are more likely to back candidates who support expanding Medicare. Slightly more than two in ten (22%) are less likely.

    The sample of voters polled included 49 percent who disapproved of President Trump’s job performance, 43 percent who approved of his job performance and 8 percent who were not sure.

    An October 2016 poll also conducted by Public Policy Polling showed that a majority of Americans across age, race, gender and party lines support expanding Social Security, with the support of millionaires and billionaires paying more into the system.

    An August 2015 AARP poll showed that a majority of Americans (61 percent) believed the average monthly Social Security benefit was too low in 2015. A majority also supports requiring people to pay more into Social Security to pay for benefits for future generations.

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  • Six things to know about your 2018 Social Security benefits

    Six things to know about your 2018 Social Security benefits

    As we move into the New Year, you likely want to know about your 2018 Social Security benefits. The Consumer Price Index is up 2 percent, which means that your Social Security benefits are up 2 percent as well, an average of $27 a month. But, because your Medicare premium may be increasing, you may not see an increase in your monthly Social Security check. Here are six things to know about Social Security in 2018.

    • The average Social Security benefit in 2018 is $1,404 for individuals (up from $1,377 in 2017) and $2,340 for families (up from $2,294 in 2017).
    • If you have been paying a Medicare Part B monthly premium of $109, your additional Social Security income will go in whole or in part to cover your 2018 Medicare Part B monthly premium. Your Medicare Part B monthly premium may increase as much as $35 to $134.
    • If you are among the 10 percent of Americans who paid the maximum amount into Social Security over the last 35 years and took Social Security at your full retirement age, your Social Security annual benefit may increase more than $1,000 in 2018. You will receive $2,788 a month, an additional $101 from 2017.
    • The cap on Social Security contributions is rising by $1,200 to $128,400. Most people contribute 6.2 percent of their earnings to Social Security up to that cap, with their employers matching that contribution with another 6.2 percent.
    • If you were born in 1956, you can take Social Security in 2018, at age 62, before your full Social Security retirement age. Your maximum monthly benefit at 62 will be $2,159. If you wait to get your full Social Security retirement benefits, your monthly benefit will be significantly higher. (Read this Just Care post to learn when to claim Social Security benefits.) Your full retirement benefits will not kick in until you are 66 and four months, two months longer than people born in 1955. And, if you are still working, Social Security may hold back some of your earned benefits.
    • Depending upon where you live and your total income, you may pay a tax on your Social Security benefits. Thirteen states tax Social Security retirement benefits: Colorado, Connecticut, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont and West Virginia.

    If you want Congress to expand Social Security, please sign this petition.

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  • When to claim Social Security benefits

    When to claim Social Security benefits

    When deciding when to stop working and when to claim Social Security benefits, there is a lot to consider. Individuals and families should weigh personal circumstances, health, financial need, and marital and family status. The National Academy of Social Insurance’s toolkit on When to Claim Social Security Benefits includes a new brief, Different People, Different Choices, that walks you through a range of possible scenarios and decisions about when to claim benefits to help you get started on this important decision.

    If you need benefits to make ends meet: Take them – you’ve earned the benefits and Social Security is there for you. But if you can wait, doing so can increase your monthly benefit for the rest of your life. Here are some helpful tips:

    If you claim Social Security benefits before your full retirement age because you are not working: If you get a job and do not need your Social Security benefits, you can request at your full retirement age that your benefits be suspended. When you reclaim Social Security benefits, you will get a higher benefit based on the number of additional months you delayed receiving benefits.

    If you’re working and claim Social Security benefits before your full retirement age: Social Security may withhold some of your benefits temporarily, depending upon how much you earn. But, Social Security will increase the amount of your benefit when you reach your FRA, to take account of the number of months in which benefits were not paid.

    If you’re working and claim Social Security benefits after you reach your FRA: Social Security will not reduce your benefits, no matter how much you earn. However, if you have an adequate income, you might consider waiting beyond your FRA to claim benefits to increase your monthly benefits for the rest of your life.

    If you are married: Each partner is entitled to up to 50% of his/her spouse’s Social Security benefit, or his/her own worker benefit, whichever is higher. (A surviving spouse is entitled to up to 100% of his/her spouse’s Social Security benefit or his/her own worker benefit, whichever is higher.)

    If you are divorced: If your marriage lasted at least 10 years, you may be eligible for the same benefits as if you were married, based on your ex-spouse’s work record.

    If you are a widow or widower: You may be eligible for Social Security ‘life insurance protection,’ known as survivor benefits.

    If you are under 18 and have a parent or sometimes a grandparent who retires, becomes disabled or dies: You may be eligible for Social Security dependent benefits.

    Claiming benefits at the appropriate time can help you and your family members achieve a more financially secure retirement. Social Security is the safest and most secure income that many retirees have, and benefits last for life and keep up with inflation. Download Different People, Different Choices to get more information relevant to your particular personal circumstances, health, financial need, and marital and family status; you can also find details on the above claiming decisions. Visit the Academy’s toolkit, When to Take Social Security, for more information.

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  • To support loved ones who are overweight, be kind

    To support loved ones who are overweight, be kind

    Many of us try to influence our partners and other loved ones to be fit and healthy. But our words can backfire. Research reveals that to support your loved ones who are overweight, it may be best to love them as they are. People wanting to lose weight are more inclined to do so when the people around them are kind to them and not directing them to do so.

    To be clear, there is a difference between the social support a partner or spouse can offer to someone who is trying to lose weight and the social control a partner or spouse can try to exercise over a person trying to lose weight. Researchers have found social support beneficial in that it provides a person with support in the face of challenges. In contrast, social control, which suggests an attempt to influence a person’s health behavior may only be beneficial if it is positive and seen as supportive so that it makes the person feel good.

    The research does not indicate which types of social control are more likely to be seen as supportive. Nor does the research reveal differences between a spouse and a good friend acting to control a behavior. But, the person, the context and kindness all appear to be key.

    Another recent study, “A Little Acceptance is Good for Your Health,” reveals that women in particular do not respond well to weight loss pressure. They want their friends and partners to tell them they look fine, to be accepting of their weight. If they are told they should lose weight, the women often feel shame and lack of self-esteem. They are more likely to ignore the advice or do the opposite and gain weight.

    In sharp contrast, when partners and friends support women, the study found the women were more likely to feel better about themselves. They were more likely to be self-motivated to lose weight or maintain their weight. Other research shows that when one spouse models healthy behavior, it can help the other spouse.

    FYI, Most people do not know it, but Medicare covers weight-loss counseling.  Medicare covers other preventive care services as well, including nutrition counseling, cardiovascular screening and smoking cessation counseling.

    A Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study shows that diet soda is no solution for weight loss.

     

     

  • Social Security: Government Should Protect and Expand Benefits, Not Pocket Them

    Social Security: Government Should Protect and Expand Benefits, Not Pocket Them

    Did you know that you are a trust fund baby? You probably don’t realize that the expression “trust fund baby,” slang for people who have had money put in trust for their economic security, applies to you, but it does.

    Money held in trust is especially valuable because it cannot be reached by creditors. If you are delinquent on your credit card payments, a portion of your salary can be garnished — deducted from every one of your pay checks and paid directly by your employer to your creditor, without your permission. All the creditor needs is a court order. But that is not true if the income comes from money held in trust for you. That money is beyond the creditor’s reach. That is true of your trust fund, as well.

    What is this trust fund of yours? Social Security. Your Social Security benefits are held in trust for you. Like other trust fund income, the money paid to you when you claim your Social Security benefits is shielded from creditors. Let a credit card company go to court to try to get a portion of your Social Security benefit. The case will be thrown out immediately.

    Financial institutions and other creditors can seize your wages and bank accounts with a court order. But, like other trust income, these institutions cannot seize your Social Security trust fund benefits. Your Social Security is beyond the reach of all your creditors. All your creditors, that is, with one shocking exception. One entity, designed to protect you, can grab your Social Security if you owe it money. That entity is the federal government.

    Since 1996, thanks to the Debt Collection Improvement Act, the federal government now has the power to garnish a portion of your Social Security benefits for the repayment of federal student loans, Veterans Administration home loans, food stamp overpayments and the like. And our government has been making use of this new power. Let’s look just at student loans.

    The nation is facing a student loan crisis. When once young adults could emerge from college with manageable debt, now they are often saddled with enormous debt. Indeed, nearly one out of two millennials, those born between 1980 and 2000, carries student debt. The amounts owed to creditors for student loan debt is skyrocketing, as the following chart shows.

    Many see student debt as a young person’s problem, but it affects all generations. People ages 65 and older owe $18.2 billion on student loans. People ages 75 and older owe around $2 billion on outstanding student loans. As the population ages, the amounts owed by those age groups are increasing rapidly.

    Some of this debt is decades old, incurred when those older people sought higher education or retraining for themselves. Some is the result of co-signing loans to help their children and grandchildren. About 90 percent of nongovernment student debt — loans made by private banks or other private financial institutions — must be co-signed and the co-signers are generally parents and grandparents.

    It doesn’t matter how good the reason for the loan or how dire the burden; if the loans can’t be paid off, they will follow you into retirement, and literally, to the grave. Student debt cannot easily be discharged in bankruptcy, despite great hardship.

    Student loans owed by seniors are much more likely to be in default than student debt held by younger Americans. In 2013, for example, twelve percent of federal student loans held by those aged 24 to 49 were in default. In contrast, 27 percent of federal student loans held by those aged 65 to 74 were in default. For those aged 75 and older, the default was more than 50 percent!

    That’s where Social Security comes into play. If the student loan was made by a private bank or other financial institution, your Social Security is safe. But beware, if the loan is a government loan. A portion of the Social Security benefits you earned can be grabbed without your permission. And it is happening at alarming rates. The number of retirees and people with disabilities who have a part of their modest Social Security benefits seized by the government to pay off student loans has tripled since 2008. 156,000 Social Security beneficiaries are currently having their earned benefits garnished to pay for college debt. And their number is projected to grow dramatically in the future, as the cost of education continues to balloon and the population ages.

    Recognizing how vital Social Security is for beneficiaries, the 1996 legislation protected a portion of it. After all, almost two-thirds (64.6 percent) of elderly beneficiaries rely on Social Security for half or more of their income. One-third rely on those modest but vital benefits for virtually all of their income. Consequently, the 1996 law requires the government to leave beneficiaries at least $750 a month ($9,000 a year). Monthly income of $750 doesn’t go very far. It didn’t go very far in 1996, and the amount has not been increased for twenty years, since the law was enacted.

    It’s long past time to overturn the wrong-headed 1996 legislation and restore the protected status of Social Security trust fund payments. That’s why, back in October, we joined with our allies to gather 375,000 signatures demanding a moratorium on the garnishment of Social Security benefits, and delivered them to the U.S. Department of Education.

    Important members of Congress recognize this wrong-headed policy and are seeking to change the law. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, has just introduced, with 6 cosponsors, S.2387, the Protection of Social Security Benefits Restoration Act. This bill would repeal the 1996 legislation altogether, so Social Security benefits could no longer be garnished to repay student loans, Veterans Administration home loans, overpayments of food stamps and other federal benefits.

    In the House of Representatives, Congressman Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has introduced, with nineteen cosponsors, the Stop Social Security Garnishment for Student Debt Act of 2015 (H.R. 3967) which would end the power of the government to garnish your Social Security benefits to repay federal student loans. And, in the event that Congress does not do the right thing and end garnishment of Social Security, Representative Ted Deutch (D-FL) has introduced the Social Security Garnishment Modernization Act of 2015 (H.R.3747), which would index the exempt amount, now at $750, to inflation.

    These visionary leaders should be applauded and supported. In addition to facing a student debt crisis, the nation is facing a looming retirement income crisis. Too many Americans fear that they will never be able to retire, while maintaining their standards of living. We should be expanding Social Security to address this crisis, not worsening it by garnishing benefits.

    An election year is a moment of accountability. I urge those of us who are concerned about the student debt crisis and the retirement income crisis demand that those seeking our vote endorse the Wyden, Grijalva, and Deutch bills. It is time to restore to Social Security the important safeguard available to all other trust fund income and available to Social Security beneficiaries for its first sixty years.

    When we created Social Security, eighty years ago, we enshrined in law that Social Security benefits would be inviolable. We earn our benefits as we work and they need to be there for us and our families when and if we become disabled, die, or reach old age. We should be secure in the knowledge that our earned Social Security benefits will be paid in full and on time. Congress should not have treated the people’s trust fund differently from all other trust funds and opened Social Security up to any creditor. Now is the time for Congress to step up, admit it was wrong, and correct its mistake.