Last updated 02.20.2024
The Biden Presidency:
Protecting our pensions, savings, and financial security. Lowering prescription drug costs. Supporting caregivers. Expanding home-based and community services. Improving the quality of nursing homes.
Reducing Medicare Costs
- Lowered Prescription Drug Prices: Forced Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices and capped out-of-pocket spending on prescriptions for Americans on Medicare.
- Capped the Price of Insulin: Passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which limited the cost of insulin to no more than $35 per month for seniors on Medicare.
- Expanded vaccine coverage: Ensured Medicare beneficiaries will now pay zero dollars out of pocket for vaccines covered by their Part D plan, including the shingles vaccine, which costs seniors up to $200.
Safeguarding Social Security and Medicare
- Foiled Attacks on Social Security and Medicare: Forced Congressional Republicans to back off efforts to cut Social Security or raise the retirement age to 70 and ended the wrongheaded idea of “sunsetting” laws that would put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block every five years.
Protecting Retiree Pension Plans and Savings
- Secured Pension Funding: Announced $36 billion for the Central States Pension Fund, preventing drastic cuts to pensions of more than 350,000 union workers and retirees.
- Kept Pension Plans Solvent: Provided financial relief to struggling multiemployer pension plans, ensuring that they would remain solvent through at least 2051 and that millions of families would receive their full benefits.
- Required Financial Advisers to Put You First: Proposed new rules banning commission-like “junk fees,” where some firms pay financial advisors more to recommend a specific investment product.
Expanding Access to At-Home Care and Support for Caregivers
- Supporting Family Caregivers: Provided $145 million to help deliver counseling, training, and short-term relief to family and other informal care providers and pushed HHS and the VA to provide more mental health supports for family caregivers, including exploring a new dementia care model offering short-term help to give family caregivers a break.
- Invested $25 Billion to Help States Strengthen Their Medicaid Home Care Programs: Included $150 billion over the next decade to improve and expand Medicaid home care services through things like recruiting, training and keeping long-term care workers on the job, including $9 billion to boost wages for home care workers.
- Improving Home-Based Care for Veterans: Expanded the VA Comprehensive Assistance for Family Caregivers program to veterans of all service eras and pushed to expand the Veteran Directed Care program to all VA Medical Centers to provide veterans a budget to hire personal care assistance, including from family members.
- Grew Community-Based Services: Signed the American Rescue Plan’s Older Americans Act to release more than $1 billion in funding to expand access to home-delivery meal systems and home- and community-based services.
Improving the Safety and Quality of Care in Nursing Homes
- Launched a Comprehensive Action Plan to Improve Nursing Homes: Cracked down on bad actors in the nursing home industry with more aggressive enforcement and penalties for the worst-performing nursing homes and included plans for improving safety and reporting standards.
- Addressed Staffing Levels: Conducted a research study to determine new guidelines for minimum staffing requirements in nursing homes and lowered financial barriers to training, certification and continued education for nurse aides to ensure we can adequately address staffing shortages with qualified individuals.
- Improved Technical Assistance and Trainings: Increased offerings to staff in nursing home facilities to improve both quality of life and safety for residents.