Villages Chapter Report to POA – June 5, 2018

Three NRLN President’s Forum Messages Issued in May

NRLN President Bill Kadereit issued three President’s Forum messages in May. The title of the May 2 message was Holes in the Safety Net – Social Security. It focused on how important Social Security is to millions of people who depend on its monthly payments and the funding crisis that Social Security is heading toward.

According to the Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees' 2017 report to Congress, Social Security has an unfunded liability of $34 trillion in the 75-year window between now and 2091. Social Security will begin paying out more in benefits than it's generating in revenue by 2022. The program will exhaust the surplus built up over the past 35 years by 2034 when Social Security’s current approximately $3 trillion in asset reserves will be completely depleted. This includes cashing in all of the IOUs the Social Security trust fund holds in lieu of cash Congress took to pay bills.

The title of the May 9 Forum message was Holes in the Safety Net – Medicare. It focused on how important Medicare is to millions of people and the funding crisis that Medicare is heading toward.

Trustees reported to Congress in 2017 that by 2029, the Medicare trust fund will be exhausted. Payroll taxes will only cover about 88% of Medicare Part A costs. Unlike Part A, beneficiaries pay premiums for Part B coverage. But these premiums account for only 23% of the program’s costs. The rest comes out of the federal Treasury.

After the Trustees issue their new report this summer, the NRLN will launch a major effort to lobby the proposal it is developing for saving Social Security and Medicare.

The May 24 Forum message reported that over 200 Chrysler retirees have received letters that their pensions had been miscalculated and the pension plan sponsor wants the overpayments back in a fairly short time. On May 14, the NRLN President, NRLN Executive Director, President of the National Chrysler Retirement Organization (NCRO) and Director of the Pension Rights Center (PRC) had two meetings in Washington, DC to present common sense proposals to address the “recoupment” issue. The first meeting was with Employee Benefits Security Administration officials at the Department of Labor. The other meeting was with officials at the Department of Treasury.

One NRLN/NCRO proposal was that a pension plan sponsor must purchase insurance that would cover the cost of calculation errors made by the plan sponsor or a contractor who made the pension calculations. If the plan sponsor did not purchase insurance, the plan sponsor instead would require the contractor liable for the over payment to purchase insurance. The second proposal was to limit the “claw back” period to three years for the plan sponsor or contractor to identify their calculation error and request recovery of overpayment over 180 months. The retiree could opt to pay the recoupment in a lump sum at his/her discretion.

The NRLN is also exploring the potential for legislation to provide fairness for retirees in pay-status whose pensions have a calculation error and owe money back to the pension plan.

NRLN 2018 Survey Underway

The NRLN sent out an email to members on May 14 inviting them to participate in its 2018 online survey. Learning members opinions on key issues is important to establishing NRLN priorities. The last NRLN survey was in May 2016. The link to the survey is: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NRLN2018.

The deadline for completing the survey is June 15. Results will be compiled in total for the NRLN and by retiree group to provide Retiree Association and NRLN Chapter leaders insights into the opinions of their members. Overall results (no individual responses) of the survey will be published in the summer edition of the NRLN FOCUS newsletter that will be posted on the NRLN website at www.nrln.org.

NRLN Action Alert: Congress Must Also Act to Cut Drug Prices

An NRLN Action Alert was issued on May 16. It noted that President Trump had announced his blueprint to lower the price of prescription drugs, but he did not call on Congress to pass laws allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices or importing safe, lower priced medicines from Canada. The NRLN’s sample letter urged members of Congress to pass existing bills authorizing these policies to institute real competition and provide relief for Americans. Seniors don’t have time to wait to see if the President’s initiatives lower prices.

The letter to Representatives and Senators noted that for too long many members of Congress have sold out to political contributions and lobbying from the pharmaceutical industry. The Pharmaceutical and Health Products Industry contributed $23.6 million to incumbents in Congress during the 2015-16 election cycle, according to the Federal Election Commission. Through April 30, in the 2017-18 election cycle, incumbents have received from pharma $12.9 million. Pharma's lobbying expenses surpassed $171 million last year.

The letter expressed concern that these contributions and lobbying pressure create undue influence on many members of Congress. Billions of dollars in savings are held up without a vote on bills in House and Senate committees and the conclusion is unavoidable that pharma's interests are being served.

Learn Which Members of Congress Have Received Pharma Contributions

Bob Martina, NRLN Vice President – Grassroots, spent several hours digging through the data in OpenSecrets.Org, Center for Responsible Politics, to identify how much Representatives, Senators and Presidential Candidates received in contributions from the Pharmaceutical and Health Products Industry during election cycles for 2011-2012; 2013-2014; 2015-2016, and 2017 through April 30, 2018.

The information was posted May 23 on the NRLN website at: https://www.nrln.org/moneyinpharma.html.

NRLN members were told in an email announcing the availability of the data, if they are troubled by the dollars their Representative and/or Senators have received from pharma to use the NRLN’s website to email their personal letters to their members of Congress.

NRLN Facebook Postings

Twelve messages, including brief versions of the six messages noted, above were posted on www.facebook/nrln1. During the month of May the messages reached over 173,000 Facebook users. All past NRLN Facebook messages are available in the NRLN Archives at: https://www.nrln.org/facebookposts.html.

Visits to NRLN Website in May

During the period 5/1 – 5/31 our www.nrln.org website experienced over 28,000 visitors and 38,000 sessions, where a visitor made more than one visit a day. There were 57 search engine robots that sampled our website via use of 46 different browsers and 11 operating systems and visitors came from 250 different websites from which they transferred from to reach us in May. Visitors from 6 different continents and 50 countries were on www.nrln.org for at least one session.