The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have a new financial management system that has generated $9 million in interest for the Medicare trust fund in just seven months. Mark McClellan, CMS administrator told Government Health IT, the new system also allows for more accurate reimbursements and faster reporting.

In a letter sent to Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao as she prepares to open the final SAVER Summit, members of Americans for Secure Retirement, a coalition of 34 organizations representing a broad cross section of interests, urged Chao and Summit attendees to explore solutions addressing often-overlooked elements of the retirement security debate.Advertisement

“It’s galling that they have a marriage penalty for seniors, when they’ve addressed it for everyone else,” Lonell Spencer, a 77-year-old retiree from Arcadia, Connecticut, told the Hartford Courant.The penalty he’s referring to is the tax on Social Security income, which applies to every dollar of income over $32,000 for married couples, compared to $25,000 for a single taxpayer.

For years governments have promised retirees hefty health care benefits to control current labor costs, experts say, according to a Crain’s Chicago Business report. “No one has thought about it as a long term liability, says Fitch Ratings analyst Joseph D. Mason.

During the last week of December, CCH, a Wolters Kluwer company and leading provider of tax, pension and human resource information and software, introduced Retirement Plans for Individuals and Small Business. This new resource was developed to help professionals advise their clients on choosing the right retirement vehicle, setting up and maintaining the plan and complying with relevant laws and regulations.“Retirement Plans for Individuals and Small Business is useful for both the novice and seasoned professional to help cut through the numerous options and related complex

The Kaiser Family Foundation has released a new retiree health benefits survey showing that almost 80 percent of employers that currently offer retiree health benefits will take government subsidies to maintain prescription coverage in 2006. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that the basic Medicare coverage of more than 12 million retirees is supplemented by company health plans. The annual survey was released last week in Washington.

Four in five employers that pay for retirees’ drug costs will accept government subsidies to continue coverage, according to a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Hewitt Associates, of 300 companies with 1,000 employees each, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. When it drafted the program, Congress created a tax-free subsidy to encourage companies to continue offering retiree drug coverage. The subsidy, for 2006, will be equal to 28 percent of a retiree’s drug costs between $250 and $5,000, the Intelligencer states.

New Jersey’s pension system needs $12.1 billion to meet its current pension obligations to teachers, police officers and local government workers, according to the report of the governor’s Benefits Review Task Force released last week.The Task Force, appointed by Acting Governor Richard Codey and headed by retired Goldman Sachs executive, Philip Murphy, concluded that the current system could not be maintained without large tax increases or severe cuts in state services, Bloomberg.com reports.

The average age of directors at U.S. businesses is increasing, partly because current CEOs, who were typically asked to serve on multiple boards, are paring back.Reuters reported that the average age of independent directors at companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index stands at 60.8, up from 60 in 1998.