Tag Archives: U.S. Senate Finance Committee

U.S. senators ask IRS if hacking campaign compromised taxpayer data

By Susan Heavey

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two top U.S. Senators on Thursday said they were seeking answers on whether the recent hacking attack against the federal government compromised U.S. taxpayers’ data, which could make millions of Americans more vulnerable to identity theft and other crimes.

As officials continued to assess damage from the cyberattack, U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking Democrat Ron Wyden asked the Internal Revenue Service whether the tax agency was affected and, if so, what it was doing to mitigate the fallout and protect against further intrusions.

The sweeping campaign, done by hackers believed to be working for Russia, leveraged technology from SolarWinds Corp used by multiple U.S. government agencies and other businesses, Reuters has reported.

The U.S. government has not publicly identified who might be behind the massive intrusion, and several U.S. lawmakers on Thursday said it appeared that U.S. officials were still analyzing the impact of the attack.

“I think the government is still assessing how bad the damage is,” Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel, told MSNBC in an interview.

Grassley and Wyden, in their letter, sought an immediate briefing from IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig on the impact to U.S. taxpayers, whose sensitive financial records are filed each year with the agency.

The IRS has used SolarWinds technology as recently as 2017, they said.

“Given the extreme sensitivity of personal taxpayer information entrusted to the IRS, and the harm both to Americans’ privacy and our national security that could result from the theft and exploitation of this data by our adversaries, it is imperative that we understand the extent to which the IRS may have been compromised,” the senators wrote.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by David Gregorio)

U.S. senators announce bipartisan proposal to lower drug prices

FILE PHOTO: Pharmaceutical tablets and capsules are arranged in the shape of a U.S. dollar sign on a table, August 20, 2014. REUTERS/Srdjan Zivulovic/File Photo

By Susan Cornwell and Michael Erman

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – The top Republican and Democrat on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee announced a proposal to lower prescription drug prices on Tuesday that could save $100 billion in costs to government healthcare programs, and said the committee would vote on the legislation on Thursday.

The committee’s chairman, Senator Chuck Grassley, and its leading Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden, said in a statement that they have been working on the bipartisan plan to “address the broken prescription drug supply chain” for six months.

“This legislation shows that no industry is above accountability,” Grassley and Wyden said.

It is not clear how much support this, or any other drug pricing measure proposed in Congress, will receive ahead of 2020 presidential elections. But the cost of U.S. healthcare is sure to be a top campaign issue.

The proposal aims to keep drug prices down – for both Medicare patients and those in the commercial market – by forcing pharmaceutical companies to pay rebates to Medicare if they raise prices of drugs more than the rate of inflation.

Those rebates would be equal to the difference between the price increases and the inflation rate.

It also includes a cap on out-of-pocket costs for drugs covered under Medicare’s Part D, which is for self-administered prescription drugs, as well as changes to the program’s Part B, which covers physician-administered drugs.

The senators said the proposal would save taxpayers $100 billion from the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Beneficiaries would save $27 billion in out-of-pocket costs.

The Trump administration and Democrats in the House of Representatives have been working on their own plans to lower the cost of medicines for U.S. consumers.

U.S. President Donald Trump, a Republican, has struggled to deliver on a pledge to lower drug prices before the November, 2020 election. His administration is currently working to push through a rule that would tie some Medicare drug prices to the lower prices paid in other countries.

The Trump administration earlier this month scrapped an ambitious policy that would have required health insurers to pass billions of dollars in rebates they receive from drugmakers to Medicare patients.

Also in July, a federal judge struck down a Trump administration rule that would have forced pharmaceutical companies to include the wholesale prices of their drugs in television advertising.

(Reporting by Susan Cornwell in Washington and Michael Erman and Carl O’Donnell in New York; Editing by Susan Thomas, Steve Orlofsky and Bill Berkrot)