Filling out a VA disability claim has long meant working through a form thick enough to intimidate anyone doing it without help. The Department of Veterans Affairs now has a formal proposal on the table to cut that paperwork down dramatically, along with the separate form survivors use to apply for benefits after a veteran’s…

Older adults living on a fixed income often assume that having a few thousand dollars set aside disqualifies them from food assistance entirely. That assumption is wrong for a specific group of households, and it may be costing eligible seniors benefits they never apply for. Federal SNAP rules set a higher savings ceiling for households…

Every SNAP application asks about medical expenses, but many households skip past the question because they assume it will not change their benefit. For a household with a member age 60 or older, that assumption can leave real money on the table. Federal rules let those households deduct nearly every dollar they spend on medical…

When Humana first announced it was heading toward a network split with Ohio State, most of the attention went to Medicare Advantage retirees who could lose access to the Wexner Medical Center. That framing left out a second, larger group facing the same October 1 deadline: Ohioans covered by Humana Healthy Horizons, the company’s Medicaid…

USDA’s Food and Nutrition Administration wants to cut in half the federal share of what it costs states to run the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Right now Washington reimburses state agencies for 50 percent of their SNAP administrative costs — the eligibility workers who process applications, the computer systems behind them, the cards issued to…

Food stamp enrollment has been falling for ten straight months, and the government’s own newest numbers show the decline is bigger than the four-million figure that has circulated since early August. Every household that lost coverage lost it for one of a small number of specific reasons, each one written into a single federal law…

Every October 1, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program resets its maximum benefit amounts for the new federal fiscal year, and this year’s reset falls a little more than a month from now. The formula behind that reset is fixed by law and runs on a Thrifty Food Plan calculation the U.S. Department of Agriculture completes…

A federal work requirement for Medicaid is no longer a proposal moving through Washington; it is a rule with a countdown attached, and the countdown does not start on the day the requirement itself takes effect. Anyone applying for coverage in Medicaid’s expansion group after January 1, 2027 will need to show a state proof…

Congress let the program that replaced stolen SNAP benefits expire on December 20, 2024, and it has not come back since. For a household whose EBT card gets skimmed or cloned today, that means there is no federal check waiting at the end of a claim form in nearly every state in the country. Only…

Thirty-three days from now, on October 1, 2026, the federal government will stop matching state Medicaid dollars spent on non-emergency care for refugees, asylees, parolees and trafficking survivors nationwide. The cutoff comes from a single provision in this year’s federal budget law, and it does not change anyone’s legal immigration status. It removes the federal…