Prices rise but an Illinois teacher pension can't keep up. Plus rising Medicare costs.

On January 1st those on Social Security will see a 5.9% increase in our monthly check.

For me that will mean seventeen more dollars a month.

It ain’t much because twenty years of paying into Social Security was reduced by two thirds once I became a teacher.

The reduction to my Social Security benefit is federal law. It is know as the WEP/GPO and impacts public service workers who receive a public pension in fifteen states.

Apparently receiving the full retirement benefit you earned is considered by the federal government as a windfall.

Jeff Bezos making billions off of the pandemic is just business.

Yearly Social Security benefits are linked to inflation, which is why this year the increase is historically high.

Our teacher pension is not tied to inflation and remains at 3% ,or roughly half the increase in the cost of goods and services.

The average teacher pension in Illinois is a little over $50,000.

Fortunately we also receive Medicare.

However, Medicare benefit costs are also going up.

The feds limited increases in Medicare in 2020 because of the pandemic. We still have the pandemic but Medicare costs are going up anyway and the feds are rolling 2020 and 2021 increases into 2022.

The premium for Part B, which covers doctor visits and other outpatient care, will increase 14.55 percent.

Medicare Part D covers prescription drugs. It is another cost going up.

President Biden’s Build Back Better bill was going to address the cost of Medicare Part D.

BBB would have capped out-of-pocket Part D costs at $2,000 a year, starting in 2024. It also would allow Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies for some high-cost drugs covered under Part D starting in 2025, and Part B, starting in 2027. The legislation also would limit cost-sharing for insulin to no more than $35 per month.

I would have wanted more. It left lots of retirement health care benefit costs untouched. But it was a start.

Thanks Joe Manchin. BBB is now on life support.

Tomorrow I am putting on my N95 mask and flying east to spend the holidays with our kids and grandkids.

We have stocked up on Covid test kits.

Finding enough kits required spending time on the phone and online searching for them since they are hard as hell to find.

I’m the driver who double parks as Anne runs into the Walgreen’s or CVS to check on test kit supplies.

Plus they are $25 for a box of two test if you can find one.

Test kits will be covered by insurance January 1st but having insurance leaves out a lot of people.

The test shortage is partly the result of one more major government screw-up.

Dr. Michael Mina describes the FDA created supply chain disaster for test kits in a series of tweets.

Here’s a frustrating secret Today - in midst of Omicron - millions of Americans are begging for access to rapid tests, thousands dying daily. Get this: many manufacturers with very high quality rapid tests are begging To ship 100’s of millions of tests to US But can’t.

By the way, Eric Reinhart and Amanda Klonsky are co-authors of an important article in The Nation on the increased and urgent need for decarceration in the face of the pandemic surge.

US jails and prisons brace for another winter Covid-19 surge, staff are quitting in droves, and a system already infamous for abuse and neglect is spiraling further out of control. At New York’s Rikers Island, for example, a rise in coronavirus infections coincided with refusals to report to work by hundreds of staff each day. The Correctional Officers’ Benevolent Association has acted with total disregard for the detained people at Rikers for whom the union’s members are ostensibly employed to ensure safety. Until recently, the union was pushing back against consequences for staff who did not show up for work and enacting rolling sickouts in protest against regulations that restrict their ability to use torture-like conditions of solitary confinement. These staffing problems are intensifying preexisting conditions of systematic abuse and have created “an absolute humanitarian crisis” that has killed at least 15 people in custody at Rikers so far this year.

It is an important read.