In the News
SOCIAL SECURITY FUNDING CRISIS LOOMS, SAY TRUSTEES
Medicare also faces shortfalls within decade
The trust funds that help pay for Social Security will be depleted in 2034 unless Congress acts to provide more funding for the program vital to the financial security of older Americans, those overseeing the program reported to lawmakers.
The trustees’ annual report to Congress, released in early June, kept the year the program would see surpluses exhausted unchanged from last year’s report. “This should be a wake-up call: Congress needs to act,” Dr. Myechia Minter-Jordan, AARP’s CEO, said in a statement. “Americans have worked hard and paid into Social Security their entire lives, and they deserve to count on it when they retire.”
Meanwhile, Medicare trustees reported that the fund helping to pay for Part A, which includes inpatient hospital stays, will be unable to meet all costs by mid-2033, three months earlier than last year’s projection.
Social Security provides payments to 71 million beneficiaries and is primarily funded by payroll taxes levied on U.S. workers and employers. If lawmakers don’t act before the trust funds are depleted, the federal tax revenues flowing into Social Security will cover only about 83 percent of benefits.
Potential options for Congress to avoid shortfalls for Social Security and Medicare include raising payroll taxes and reducing benefits. The trustees say acting sooner rather than later will broaden the range of solutions and allow any changes to be phased in.
Congress last made major adjustments to Social Security’s financial structure in 1983, accelerating an increase in the payroll tax and raising the full retirement age from 65 to 67, among other steps. Those changes were designed to allow the program to build up a large surplus, as incoming revenue would outpace payments to beneficiaries. But in recent years, as birth rates have declined and the retiree population has grown, the equation has flipped. Since 2021, Social Security has been paying out more each year to recipients than it collects in revenue and interest that accrues on the funds, reducing the surplus built up over decades.
Lawmakers have long known the rough deadline for addressing Social Security’s finances, says Gopi Shah Goda, director of the Retirement Security Project at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank. Since the early 2010s, the trustees have projected a depletion date between 2033 and 2036. But years of congressional inaction have narrowed the window for solutions, she says.
“AARP opposes any changes that cut Americans’ Social Security payments, whether by reducing the COLA [cost-of-living adjustment], privatization or raising the retirement age,” says Nancy LeaMond, AARP’s executive vice president and chief advocacy and engagement officer.
High Court Upholds Rx Price Parleys
Medicare prescription drug price negotiations, which have already brought down costs for beneficiaries, will continue, after the Supreme Court in May rejected an effort by drug companies to challenge the law requiring mandatory negotiations between government officials and pharmaceutical manufacturers.
That law, enacted in 2022, authorizes Medicare to bargain with pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices on widely used medications. Drug companies that fail to reach an agreement on price are required to pay an excise tax to Medicare on drug sales or withdraw from Medicare and Medicaid. The law also requires manufacturers to pay a rebate to Medicare if they raise a price by more than the general rate of inflation.
The first round of Medicare drug price negotiations, in 2024, produced lower prices for 10 medications. Those prices took effect on Jan. 1, 2026, and cover treatments for arthritis, cancer, diabetes, heart failure and kidney disease. As a result, Medicare Part D enrollees are expected to save $1.5 billion collectively in out-of-pocket costs this year.
Tick Threat Up, Officials Say
Emergency room visits for tick bites were at a nine-year high this spring, and this summer could be an even worse time for avoiding the disease-carrying pests, health officials forecast.
“Tick season is more severe and longer than it was in the past,” says Thomas Hart, an infectious disease microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in April that emergency room visits for tick bites were at their highest for the first months of the year since 2017. The CDC estimated that almost half a million people had Lyme disease in 2023, and that number keeps growing.
“This year, we’re already seeing about 25 percent more admissions to the emergency room for tick-borne diseases than we saw at this time last year,” Hart says.
Climate change has lengthened tick season. “They like warm and wet weather,” says Dr. Daniel M. Pastula, a professor of neurology, infectious diseases and epidemiology at the University of Colorado School of Public Health. When it gets warmer, he says, “the tick ranges can expand, and we’re seeing that with certain tick species.”
Tick-borne illnesses present a special risk to older people because they are hiking, in gardens and in other infested areas more than other adults, experts say.
ITCH SWITCH
Researchers have found a “stop scratching” signal that tells the brain to quit clawing at irritants, says a study presented at the Biophysical Society’s annual meeting. Mice missing the protein TRPV4 scratched for much longer than others once they started—suggesting it’s an inhibitor.
JOIN THE FIGHT TO PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY
Go to aarp.org/nocuts to send a message to lawmakers: Protect and strengthen Social Security without any cuts to payments.