Scott Burns, Published: 01 March 2014 05:05 PM

Older readers start grinding their teeth when they get their taxes done. This year is no different. The grinding starts when retirees discover that their tax bills are a lot higher than they thought they would be.

How can this happen? Simple. When Social Security was created, one of the fundamental promises was that benefits would never be taxed.

But that was then. Some retirees have been paying taxes on their benefits since 1984. That was when both parties, in a rare display of bipartisan agreement, voted to begin taxing Social Security benefits.

Two household names that voted for the bill are still in office: Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. John McCain. Both of them claim to support middle-class Americans.

By Pete Kasperowicz, February 28, 2014, 11:55 am

The House next week will consider legislation that would eliminate the individual mandate penalty under ObamaCare for the rest of 2014.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said the legislation would put individuals on par with companies, which had their mandate to provide health insurance waived until at least 2015. Earlier this year, the Obama administration extended that waiver until 2016 for companies with 50 to 99 employees.

Patrick Howley, Political Reporter, 3:24 PM 02/28/2014

The Obama administration announced Thursday that states with faulty Obamacare enrollment websites will be able to “retroactively” give taxpayer subsidies to people who signed up for private insurance plans off the Obamacare exchanges.

The administration’s executive decision to make Obamacare tax credits, which count as subsidies, available to non-Obamacare customers was slammed Friday by House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Joe Pitts.

“It is outrageous for the Obama administration to be quietly telling states: pay subsidies now, worry about the paperwork later. The administration is blatantly ignoring the law, paying subsidies to plans outside of exchanges,” Pitts said.

By TOM MURPHY, February 28, 2014 4:10 PM ET

(AP) – Another alarm has been sounded by health insurers over potential price hikes and benefit cuts for seniors should the U.S slash Medicare Advantage reimbursements again.

You can expect the clamor to grow louder given that the fight in this corner of the health industry runs through political and corporate circles equally, with the potential to tip control of Congress, as well as shape a massive source of future growth for insurers.

This week, in a study commissioned by the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, researchers found that Medicare Advantage customers could see benefits decline, and rates could go up between $35 and $75 a month next year.

Translation: You’re going to pay more and get less.

By Kelly Greene, Feb. 28, 2014, 5:01 a.m. EST

Experts are starting to rethink how much stock people should hold in retirement.

In general, the new thinking goes, people should be more heavily invested in equities than is suggested by some traditional rules of thumb, such as subtracting one’s age from 100 to determine a portfolio’s stock allocation. One new, and controversial, theory even goes so far as to suggest that stock exposure should increase the further one moves into retirement.

What hangs in the balance: whether 78 million baby boomers can generate sizable enough returns, without taking on too much risk, to create income streams that last as long as they do.

Feb 28, 2014

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that chronically ill consumers who obtain coverage from the online insurance marketplaces may still face high drug costs despite the health law’s ban on discriminatory insurance practices. Also, news outlets report on Time magazine’s cover story that details how the Obama administration almost shutdown healthcare.gov during its early, fitful days.

The Wall Street Journal: Health Plans Rush To Size Up New Clients
Insurers are rushing to gather health information from the new customers they won on public marketplaces in a high-stakes outreach effort crucial to their hopes of profiting from the health-care law. Health plans need to know the health status of those signing up for coverage so they can project whether the costs are likely to outrun the premiums coming in. That information will be critical in figuring out prices for next year, among other things. But, under the law’s new rules, enrollees don’t have to disclose pre-existing conditions to buy insurance (Mathews, 2/27).

By Russ Britt, February 27, 2014, 12:00 PM

The Obama administration considered scrapping the HealthCare.gov Web site at the height of the crisis in which the troubled portal was stuck in neutral after its Oct. 1 launch, according to a story released Thursday.

A piece by Steven Brill on Time magazine’s website says that President Barack Obama and his aides were having trouble getting clear signals from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials on what was crippling the site in mid-October, before the administration assembled a team of technology experts from outside government to help rescue the program.

Scott Gottlieb, Contributor, 2/27/2014 @ 1:12PM

Yesterday the Internal Revenue Service posted guidance outlining its intent to enforce Obamacare’s “individual mandate” – a tax on those who don’t sign up by the end of March for health insurance that meets the law’s requirements. It was part of the plan all along, that health officials would raise noise around the tax penalty heading into the closing days of Obamacare’s open enrollment. The idea is to use the specter of this tax as a way to coerce a few more stragglers and holdouts into the insurance market.

Posted on February 27, 2014 | By Kathleen Pender

Most high-income people subject to the new 3.8 percent Medicare tax on certain net investment income can safely file their 2013 tax returns now that the Internal Revenue Service has finally published final instructions for calculating the tax.

The instructions for Form 8960 – all 19 pages of them — were published on IRS.gov late Wednesday night.

Feb 27, 2014

Among other things, the proposal would limit the types of antidepressants — and other kinds of drugs — that are available to Medicare beneficiaries. Drug industry and insurer groups are lining up against the change.

The Wall Street Journal: Medicare Urged To Rethink Revamp Of Part D Drug Plan
Lawmakers from both parties asked the White House Wednesday to scrap a plan that would limit the types of antidepressants and other drugs available to seniors through Medicare. The plan, aimed at reducing drug costs, is part of a broad set of proposed changes to the Medicare Part D prescription-drug program that covers medicines for about 39 million beneficiaries. In January, the agency proposed ending the practice of covering essentially any type of antidepressant, antipsychotic or immunosuppressant drug for consumers in the program (Corbett Dooren, 2/26).