The author of a new book on the creation of Medicare recalls that the debate was just as passionate as what’s being heard in town hall meetings all over the country. James Morone, co-author of The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office described the debate–and President Lyndon Johnson’s strategy to pass [...] [read full article…]
It’s illegal for employers to discriminate based on age. But age bias is widely acknowledged to be a key factor in job loss and hiring practices–something that should be painfully obvious to even a casual reader of newspapers, which routinely run articles about laid-off midlife workers. In 2008, layoff-related age discrimination claims filed with the [...] [read full article…]
Many of the protesters showing up at this month’s town hall meetings on health care reform are old enough to be on Medicare–or they’re pretty close. They’re also old enough to know better; here we have beneficiaries of a gigantic, successful federal health insurance program screaming at their legislators to keep the government out of [...] [read full article…]
Get ready for a big push from the mutual fund industry this fall urging you to convert your traditional tax-sheltered retirement account to a Roth IRA. The inspiration for the marketing drumbeat is a change in federal law next year that lifts the household income limit for eligibility to convert traditional IRAs to Roth accounts. [...] [read full article…]
The health care reform debate is raging, but the Obama Administration still plans to get to Social Security reform sometime in its first term, according to Lawrence Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council. Summers told a conference of economists earlier this week that Obama’s priority will be shoring up benefits–not privatization as [...] [read full article…]
