Claire has always believed that current and future seniors deserve the Social Security and Medicare benefits they’ve earned during the course of their working lives. Protecting those benefits and advocating for the elderly have been a top priority for her throughout her time in the U.S. Senate.

Fighting for Seniors

Claire has repeatedly fought efforts to privative Social Security and Medicare—knowing that pushing Missouri’s seniors into the private health insurance market and turning their retirement over to Wall Street investors is the wrong thing to do. She’s supported reforms that would extend the Social Security and Medicare promise into the future so that tomorrow’s retirees are not struggling to make ends meet.

With a decades-long commitment to strong oversight, Claire has repeatedly fought to ensure that Missouri’s seniors aren’t preyed upon by scam artists. She has worked to prevent the unethical “poaching” of veterns’ pensions, a practice that some dishonest financial advisors have pushed on former servicemembers.

And Claire recently became the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Special Committee on Aging—the Senate’s top venue for discussing and solving problems that affect America’s seniors. In this post, Claire has held hearings aimed at increasing Alzheimer’s research funding, shed light on a rampant and growing IRS-impersonation scheme, and examined what can be done to encourage saving for a secure retirement.

Strengthening Social Security

Claire has repeatedly opposed efforts to privatize Social Security, recently voting against a budget measure that would have put the program in the hands of Wall Street investors.

She led the effort to prevent debt collectors from illegally garnishing Seniors’ Social Security benefits, telling the Social Security Administration, “It’s just plain wrong to allow creditors to tap into these funds, leaving people with virtually nothing.”

Protecting Medicare

In addition to reforms enacted in the Affordable Care Act, Claire has consistently opposed efforts to transform Medicare into a voucher system, saying in 2012, "Too many members of Congress who told us they'd focus on job-creation, instead seem willing to pull the rug out from under Missouri's seniors in order to reward corporations and the richest Americans. They need to drop their obsession with turning Medicare into a voucher program and start finding ways to put more Americans back to work."

Believing that waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicare system endanger benefits for America's seniors, Claire also used her Chairmanship of a key Senate oversight panel to investigate aggressive sales and marketing tactics in the medical equipment industry, and improper billing to the Medicare system. One of Claire's investigations was launched in part because of a letter she received from a Missouri doctor, asking the Senator to investigate medical device companies who had "badgered" patients and submitted prescription requests for equipment that the patients did not ask for.

For more information on Claire’s fight to protect Medicare, visit mccaskill.senate.gov/healthcare. 

Reforming Reverse Mortgages

Claire has been a champion of strengthening consumer protections and program integrity of the reverse mortgage program since chairing a 2007 Special Committee on Aging hearing on the matter.

Reverse mortgages allow borrowers 62 years old and older to tap into their home equity without having to move out or immediately repay the loan.

Although Claire recognizes that reverse mortgages can be helpful for many older Americans, reverse mortgages can also be risky for some borrowers because they are expensive and complicated. In practice, many seniors who lack financial guidance must rely on brokers and lenders for assistance. Unfortunately, the brokers and lenders have conflicting financial incentives, leading to marketing that rewards deals to boost lenders’ profits, but increase costs to seniors. Furthermore, it has been reported that some seniors are being persuaded to put the proceeds of their reverse mortgages into expensive long-term care or annuity contracts that offer little or no benefit to the borrower while exhausting their home equity. Many now believe the reverse mortgage market resembles the subprime market, a market that substantially contributed to the financial disaster on Wall Street and the real estate collapse in 2008. Claire has conducted aggressive oversight of reverse mortgages in order to protect America's seniors, prevent more market turmoil and put a stop to abusive lending practices.

At a field hearing in St. Louis that Claire chaired on reverse mortgages, she heard testimony about a woman whose home equity was drained after an agent used the proceeds of a reverse mortgage to buy deferred annuities, which ate up much of her home's equity in fees and tied up the remainder for decades. Claire worked to include protections against this kind of cross-selling of annuities into the Housing Economic Recovery Act. At another Committee on Aging hearing that she chaired, the Government Accountability Office testified that counseling – the single most important consumer protection – is inadequate.

Consequently, Claire authored legislation that will increase criminal penalties for fraud, strengthen counseling, and improve program integrity and enforcement activities in an effort to protect taxpayers, seniors and this program for those who must rely on their home equity for retirement.