The financial news that actually matters
Medicare Advantage enrollees heading into the 2027 plan year got a reassuring national number from federal officials: about 80% of members can keep their current plan without paying a higher premium. The figure comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which put it at “approximately eight in 10” beneficiaries. The same arithmetic leaves…
A Medigap policy with a high deductible does not start paying on the first dollar of a bill. Under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ March 2026 Medigap guide, a policyholder with a high-deductible Plan F or Plan G must cover the first $2,950 of 2026 costs personally before the insurer pays anything. The…
The federal Medicare agency has put a number on how cheap a Part D drug plan will be to find for 2027. CMS says 93% of non-low-income Medicare beneficiaries will have access to an enhanced Part D plan at less than $6 a month. The figure is a forecast of access built from accepted plan…
Of the people in an inspector general’s sample who were flagged for a Treasury tax refund offset over an old Social Security debt, 34 had seen any money come back by June 2026, and the total was only $53,651. The sample covered 175 people who had received child benefits and later owed overpayments, and the…
The Social Security Administration’s inspector general has estimated that agency employees did not resolve roughly $242.6 million in child-benefit overpayments in line with policy, affecting about 76,904 people. Because the number comes from a sample rather than a full count, the auditors put a 90 percent confidence interval around it, running from $160,020,153 to $325,073,704….
Medicare patients who take certain physician-administered drugs could see their share of the bill fall sharply under a mandatory pricing model the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services finalized this week. The agency’s own illustration shows 94 percent of the drugs it modeled carrying coinsurance of between 2 and 12 percent, compared with the standard…
Florida’s Medicare Advantage market is about to get smaller, and the state it serves is large. CMS’s 2027 state fact sheet, dated September 28, 2026, counts 5,334,437 Florida residents enrolled in Medicare and shows the number of Medicare Advantage plans in the state falling from 611 this year to 560 for 2027. Open enrollment for…
The Direct Express debit card that carries federal benefit payments for people without bank accounts now has a new issuer on paper. Treasury’s program page, updated September 1, 2026, names Fifth Third Bank as the issuer of the card, while the Social Security Administration has told current Comerica cardholders to keep using what they already…
“While home prices continued to decline in real terms in July 2026, marking the 14th consecutive month of real declines, slightly lower inflation and stronger nominal home price appreciation helped narrow the gap,” said Rebecca Kaufman, Associate Director of Commodities at S&P Dow Jones Indices, in the index provider’s September 29 release. Home prices have…
Freddie Mac’s weekly survey put the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate at 7.28 percent for the week of October 1, 2026, up from 6.34 percent a year earlier. The reading also sits 25 basis points above the 7.03 percent recorded a week before, a one-week move large enough to change what a new loan costs…