ShareThisOur elders are already in a bad mood. Their retirement accounts are far from recovered and they've turned out in droves to register their fears about health-care reform.
But that's only a prelude to a winter of senior-citizen discontent over Social Security and Medicare. Recession and deflation make it certain the Social Security Administration will make it official in October that retirees will get no cost-of-living boost in their checks come January, and maybe none through 2012. (This year, they got a 5.8 percent raise, known as a cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA.)
And while it's true that the costs of food, clothing and even some forms of energy are down, health care hasn't gotten the memo. The monthly cost for Medicare coverage for physicians and outpatient care is expected to go up about $8 for 2010. And average premiums for the popular Medicare drug-coverage plans will see a $2 up tick -- expenses that long haven't been felt due to cost-of-living hikes. No longer.
The only saving grace for about 33 million Medicare patients is a provision that premiums can't rise more than COLA. But 11 million seniors with higher incomes, as well as new enrollees, will pay more, and everyone faces higher tabs for drug coverage.
A "National Emergency Child Locator Center" is being established by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help track and locate children who become separated from parents or guardians during a major disaster. It will be operated out of the privately run National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, according to Government Security News, an online newsletter that first reported the program.
While that sounds like a good idea, FEMA also intends to create teams of teen-agers -- called "Teen Community Emergency Response Teams" -- that will be trained to help out when emergency responders are not immediately available at the site of a disaster. (Particularly if it's at a mall.)
And then there's the new "FEMA for Kids" Web site, www.fema.gov/kids. It features "disaster-related games" and other learning opportunities. ("Let's count the flooded homes, Johnny...")
Who knew? Vending machines apparently are voracious gulpers of energy, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, which, on orders of President Obama, announced this past week it is cracking down on them.
The Energy Department sent forth the first-ever energy-efficiency standards for soda and other vending machines, of which about 2.3 million are now in use nationwide. The feds say the new rules, once they take effect in 2012, could cut a machine's electricity use by about 3,000 kilowatt hours per year.
Among the changes expected: reductions in the illumination of the machines and a switch to more efficient -- and "green" -- refrigerants.
You can read all 189 pages of the regulatory minutiae at http://www.energy.gov/news2009/7853.html.
Mother Nature is not amused: A new study fingers nitrous oxide -- better known as "laughing gas" -- as the world's top ozone killer caused by man.
Research by the Earth System Research Laboratory at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the emissions -- which come from the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers, the burning of biofuel and sewage-treatment processes, among other things -- are more damaging that the more commonly known ozone-hole makers such as chlorofluorocarbons.
Published in the publication Science, the study calls for limits on laughing-gas emissions similar to those that regulate CFCs.
(E-mail Lee Bowman at bowmanl(at)shns.com and Lisa Hoffman at hoffmanl(at)shns.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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