NARFE'S ACCOMPLISHMENTS

    Obtained legislation that allowed survivor benefits;

    Restored full annuity to retirees following the death of the designated survivor;

    Supported a change from "High-5" to "High-3" years of service as the basis for computing annuities;

     Achieved passage of the Second Spouse Bill to allow benefits for a second spouse or a spouse in a post-retirement marriage;

     Succeeded in having annuitants included in the annual Open Season to allow changes in their FEHBP coverage;

     Initiated legislation to allow survivor annuitants to remarry after age 55 without loss of their federal survivor annuity or FEHBP coverage;

    Achieved liberalization of the 1983 Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO) amendments to the Social Security Act, lessening the adverse economic affect of these two provisions;

     Formulated the policy and coordinated the support for enactment of the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) in 1986;

    Spearheaded efforts which led to enactment of an amendment to the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Budget Enforcement Act of 1985, giving federal and military retiree COLAs the same protection from automatic sequestration that the original bill gave Social Security COLAs; 

     Protected COLAs against numerous proposals to withhold, delay or eliminate this annual boost in the annuities of federal retirees and survivors; without this protection, the annuity of the federal worker who retired 20 years ago would be 70% less than it is today;

    Supported legislation in 1989 that substituted a "phantom premium" in the FEHBP premium-sharing formula so that withdrawal of the large Aetna plan did not result in major premium hikes for enrollees;

    Authored a statutory guarantee requiring the Secretary of the Treasury to reinvest and make whole any interest lost to the Civil Service Retirement Trust Fund as a result of any debt suspension;

    Supported the 1989 Davis v. Michigan case before the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that states could not tax federal annuities unless they applied the same tax laws to their respective state and local government pensions;  that decision set off a round of legal and legislative challenges in states across the nation.  In some 23 states, these NARFE-lead efforts eventually resulted in thousands of annuitants receiving considerable tax refunds and thousands more benefiting each year from savings in state taxes;

    Led a successful national campaign to repeal the Medicare Catastrophic Act and its accompanying surtax on millions of older Americans;

    Won a long battle to enact federal legislation prohibiting states from source-taxing the retirement income of former residents;

      In 1993, saved survivor annuitants from an ill-conceived budget proposal that would have reduced future survivor annuities by some 10 percent.

    In 1998 played a strategic role in developing a new "Fair Share" premium-sharing formula, for FEHBP that has saved enrollees hundreds of dollars each year;

    Deleted a proposal from the FY 1999 House budget resolution that would have shifted new FEHBP premiums ($3.1 billion in additional costs) to employees and annuitants;

    Fought efforts to introduce controversial Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs) into the FEHBP, saving enrollees from even higher heath care costs.