Author: Elizabeth Blessing
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Social Security’s overpayment rules reach a survivor’s lump-sum death payment and the deceased person’s estate
When a Social Security beneficiary dies while still owing the agency money from an earlier overpayment, that debt does not disappear along with them. The Social Security Administration follows a specific, ranked sequence for trying to recover the balance, and the sequence can reach a surviving spouse’s one-time death payment, reduce another family member’s own…
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Marketplace enrollment is down by 3 million people after premium payments jumped this year
Nearly three million fewer people were enrolled in an Affordable Care Act marketplace plan in early 2026 than a year earlier, and the households that kept their coverage watched their monthly premium bill climb sharply at the same time. The two trends line up on the calendar: enhanced federal premium tax credits that had capped…
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The 10 percent global import surcharge expired July 24 and was replaced by tariffs on 60 economies
A tariff that touched nearly every imported product sold in the United States quietly expired this summer, and it did not go away so much as get replaced by something more targeted. The change matters for anyone assuming the extra 10 percent tacked onto import costs since February is still showing up in store prices…
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Four kinds of debt can take a federal refund before it reaches the bank, and the IRS is not the agency that knows why
A federal tax refund can arrive smaller than the number on the return for two very different reasons, and only one of them has anything to do with the IRS. The first is a correction to the return itself — a math error, a disallowed credit, an old tax bill. The second is a debt…
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Anyone still getting a Social Security check by mail can move to a prepaid card or ask Treasury for a waiver
A claim keeps circulating that Social Security paper checks stop for good on September 30, 2026. That is not what Social Security’s own written guidance says. The actual legal deadline for the shift to electronic federal benefit payments passed a year earlier, and the agency’s current public statement is only that it intends to finish…
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Negotiated Medicare prices on 15 more drugs take effect January 1
Medicare’s second round of drug price negotiations is now locked in, and the timeline is easy to blur with a newer, separate round that just started. The federal government finished bargaining with manufacturers over 15 widely prescribed drugs months ago, and those negotiated prices take effect for Medicare Part D and Part B plans on…
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Prosecutors restrained $52 million of scam money in one day and seized the Xinbi marketplace behind it
Federal prosecutors in Washington pulled off an unusually large one-day haul this week, restraining roughly $52 million in cryptocurrency tied to a Chinese-language marketplace that functioned less like an underground criminal network and more like a supplier catalog for scam operators. The Department of Justice’s Scam Center Strike Force says the seizure pushes its running…
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Congress let the authority to replace food stamp benefits stolen by card skimmers expire, and it has not come back
Card skimming has not stopped, but the federal program that once reimbursed food stamp households for benefits stolen this way has. For nearly two years now, anyone whose SNAP card gets skimmed or cloned has had no guaranteed way to get that money back from the government, and nothing currently on the public record would…
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The IRS wants taxpayers to lock down a six-digit PIN before someone else files a return in their name
The Internal Revenue Service and its Security Summit partners used the fourth entry in a summer awareness campaign to push a blunt message at taxpayers and the professionals who file for them: a stolen Social Security number is often all a criminal needs to file a bogus return, and a free six-digit code from the…
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CMS names nine groups exempt from the Medicaid work rule, including veterans with a total disability rating
Nine categories of people will never have to prove they worked, trained or volunteered a single hour to keep Medicaid, once the program’s new community-engagement requirement takes hold. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services carved them out entirely in the interim final rule it issued June 1, 2026 — a permanent exemption, not a…
