Main Street Dollars

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On April 30, 2026, the federal government’s customs-duty receipts for the fiscal year stood at $188.6 billion. Three months later the same line in the Treasury’s books read $154.5 billion. That roughly $34 billion swing is not a collapse in imports or a bookkeeping quirk. It is a refund program running in reverse through the…

UnitedHealthcare says it is no longer negotiating, and University of Miami hospitals leave its Medicare Advantage network on January 1

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in Medicare

UnitedHealthcare ended 14 months of contract talks with the University of Miami Health System on July 31 by signing a multi-year agreement that left one group of patients outside it. The deal secured in-network access at UHealth for people covered through employer plans, Affordable Care Act marketplace plans and Florida Medicaid. A different contract governs…

Medicare’s drug deductible jumps to $700 in January, with a $2,400 out-of-pocket cap

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in Medicare

Seven hundred dollars is the figure that governs January. That is where the standard Medicare Part D deductible lands on January 1, 2027, up from $615 in the current year, and it is the amount of covered drug spending a beneficiary absorbs before a plan begins paying its share. The increase is $85, and it…

Soda and candy stop ringing up on EBT cards in 18 states

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in Groceries & Gas

The group affected here is easy to draw a line around: anyone paying with a SNAP EBT card in one of the 18 states whose federal food-restriction waiver is still standing. Eight of those states already run the restriction at the checkout lane. The other ten switch on between the last day of this month…

A boiler room sold retirees pre-IPO stakes at prices 46 percent above what it paid, the SEC says

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in Fraud & Scams

More than 800 mostly retail investors across the United States, many of them retirees, put over $74 million into eleven private funds that offered a stake in companies before those companies went public, according to a complaint the Securities and Exchange Commission filed on August 14, 2026. The agency says those investors were reached by…

Quartz countertops now face a four-year import quota that took effect August 15

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in Housing & Rent

At 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on August 15, a tariff-rate quota took effect on imported quartz surface products, the engineered slabs that reach American homes as kitchen counters, vanity tops and shower surrounds. It was created by Proclamation 11051, signed on July 31, 2026 and published in the Federal Register on August 5. The measure…

Home insurance premiums rose as much as 43 percent above inflation since 2018, and non-renewals more than doubled

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in Insurance

Forty-three and three-tenths percent is the steepest inflation-adjusted rise in the average homeowners insurance premium recorded in any of the four regions the National Association of Insurance Commissioners tracks, measured across 2018 through 2024. The gentlest regional increase over those same seven years was 18.3 percent, also after inflation is stripped out. Both figures come…

Social Security added 14 fast-track conditions to its disability list

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in Social Security

The group reached by this change is a narrow one: people applying for Social Security disability benefits whose medical file names one of 14 diagnoses the agency added on August 11, 2026, and the families waiting alongside them for an answer. For that group the change is about calendar time rather than dollars. The additions…

A new IRS report shows a lender or employer that you filed and paid on time

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in Free Tax Help

A single PDF, downloadable at any hour from an IRS Individual Online Account, now exists for the sole purpose of being handed to somebody else. The Tax Compliance Report states whether a taxpayer filed returns and paid taxes on time, and it is built to be shared when a lender, an employer or a benefits…

Car loan balances hit a record $1.71 trillion as auto delinquencies stay elevated

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