The financial news that actually matters
Legislation to repeal the federal income tax on Social Security benefits outright now carries the backing of 35 House Republicans, including its lead sponsor. The Senior Citizens Tax Elimination Act has been reintroduced in nearly every Congress for more than two decades, and its current version, H.R.1040, has sat in the House Ways and Means…
A House bill introduced last November would put into law a guarantee that Social Security pays beneficiaries their full benefit amount along with an accurate annual cost-of-living increase. The measure comes from a small group of House Republicans and has sat in the Ways and Means Committee since it was filed, with no hearing or…
More than a year after Congress repealed the rules that had shrunk Social Security checks for millions of retired teachers, police officers and firefighters, tens of thousands of them still do not know how many months of back pay they are actually owed. The gap traces to a single question the 2023 repeal law never…
A bill in the U.S. House would increase Social Security benefits and change how the program is funded in an effort to extend the life of its trust funds, according to the measure’s own text. The Strengthening Social Security Act of 2026 arrives as the program’s trustees have again reported a firm depletion timeline for…
Health insurers selling ACA Marketplace plans are asking state regulators to approve a median premium increase of about 14 percent for 2027, according to a preliminary analysis of the rate filings insurers were required to submit this summer. If regulators approve the requests largely as filed, it would mark a second straight year of double-digit…
A year-end accounting from the Labor Department’s benefits enforcement arm shows that more than 8,000 people who once worked for companies with pension plans that later shut down have collected money the law says they were owed all along. The recoveries did not happen this week or even this year — they cover fiscal year…
A bill introduced in the U.S. Senate this summer would index to inflation the income thresholds that determine how much of a retiree’s Social Security check gets taxed — numbers that have not moved since the early 1980s and mid-1990s. Because those thresholds are fixed dollar figures written into the tax code rather than numbers…
A Medicare Advantage exodus that unfolded across 2025 is still showing up on renewal notices a year later. About 2.6 million people lost their Medicare Advantage coverage when insurers pulled out of their markets, and industry researchers estimate that roughly 440,000 of them bought a Medigap policy for 2026 using a federal right that waived…
Aetna has told the outside marketing organizations that sell its Medicare Advantage plans that it will not pay agents or brokers a commission for enrolling new members in 123 of its plans across 33 states for the 2027 plan year. The freeze, distributed in a notice last month, does not cancel a single plan or…
A federal search tool built to reconnect workers with retirement money they left behind at old jobs has logged its first full year of results, and the numbers show both promise and a persistent gap. Nearly 70,000 of the roughly 236,000 people who logged into the Retirement Savings Lost and Found database between its December…
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