Seniors

Congressman Connolly believes we need to ensure that all Americans can retire with peace of mind. As Chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, he helped launch the 50+ Initiative to address the many challenges facing our seniors, including housing, health care access, transportation, and educational and volunteer opportunities. He knows that seniors are a resource within the community, and that we should provide support and opportunities for them to remain active members of our community. He is promoting legislation to protect access to affordable health care and prescription drugs, improve the quality of life, and ensure financial security for older Americans.

We must protect the promise of Social Security and Medicare for today's retirees and future generations. Congressman Connolly has opposed efforts to dismantle these programs, including privatization, which would force seniors to buy insurance on the private market. He supports legislation that expands benefits that Americans have earned through Social Security, cuts taxes for millions of seniors, ensures Social Security will remain solvent through the end of the century, and adopts a more accurate formula to calculate the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA).

He has also introduced legislation which brings equity to the way the COLA is determined under the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) and Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS). His legislation would ensure that FERS retirees’ COLA is calculated the same way as the COLA for CSRS retirees.

Congressman Connolly is also fighting to make prescription drugs more affordable. In passing the ACA, we closed the Medicare prescription drug donut hole. He supports reforms that will help lower prescription drug prices like empowering the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate the price of drugs, creating an out-of-pocket limit on prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries, and requiring drug manufacturers to issue a rebate back to Medicare if they increase prices faster than inflation. He supports reinvesting the savings from these reforms in dental, vision, and hearing benefits for Medicare beneficiaries. He helped pass legislation to fix reimbursement rates for Medicare and TRICARE providers, ensuring seniors can keep their doctor.

He supported the renewal of the Older Americans Act, which increased federal funding for senior nutrition, support services, and overall health programs, and improved transportation services. He also supported legislation increasing federal funding for cancer and Alzheimer's research, and will continue to support research and innovation efforts in this area. Congressman Connolly has also supported legislation that permanently extends the ability of seniors to make tax-free distributions from IRA’s for charitable purposes, and helps make retirement planning easier.