FYI: Near-retirees still have a lot to learn about their Social Security retirement benefits, according to a new nationwide poll released by Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company this week.
Nearly half (47 percent) of Americans age 50 and over failed a basic true/false question quiz on Social Security retirement benefits. Still, that’s an improvement over three years ago when MassMutual surveyed the nation with a broader true/false question quiz, which 62 percent of respondents age 50 and over failed, and 72 percent of the general population failed.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.fa-mag.com/news/nearly-half-of-americans-still-don-t-understand-social-security-38770.html?print
Comments
When I see people living on minimum wage, it really gets to me. If they can exist/subsist, I will figure out a way to do same without SS benefits.
Jeff Bezos can go and F himself on Mars.
PS - Warren Buffet is on record saying he does not claim SS benefits. I would really like to know which one-percenters claim SS. There has to be a list. I read somewhere Romney has $2MM in his IRA. Would really like to know if he claims SS.
Yes, I'm sure you'll be fine financially with or without it, but it will definitely be there for you. You might as well look into it.
I wonder how many Americans realize what a burden HC costs are becoming for US retirees, and how it will effect their "budgets".
Regarding Buffett, could you point to the record? Buffett said on Fox Business in 2013 (in response to a question about why he's still working): "I am 82 and I'm getting social security now so I don't need to do it for the money."
Transcription: https://www.bizjournals.com/triad/blog/2013/05/wake-forest-students-want-to-know.html
Fox Business video: http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/2359891806001
Here's a PWC report, projecting slightly higher increases in medical costs in 2018 than in 2017 (but the same as 2014, and lower than 2015). It discusses the upward and downward pressures on these costs.
https://www.pwc.com/us/en/health-industries/health-research-institute/behind-the-numbers.html
The GOP has (somewhat) sabotaged health care, via tampering with insurance. But insurance rates are not the same as the cost health care. Insurance tampering could even bring down total spending by lowering utilization (due to higher deductibles, higher copays, fewer people buying insurance).
While I'm not saying this is a good thing, I am unclear as to what you mean by health costs, and how sabotage increased those costs.
@msf: All the more reason to expand the deportation of "illegal" immigrant workers rather than rationalize the situation and incorporate them into the SS and general tax systems. Idiots!!
Have not reexamined all of the sublinks since the analyses first appeared.
I bet they don't parse costs properly either.
Of course you know Price's comment:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/05/01/trumps-former-health-secretary-americans-will-pay-more-because-gop-weakened-obamacare/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americans-are-starting-to-suffer-from-trumps-health-care-sabotage/2018/05/06/c60fb6fa-4fb2-11e8-b725-92c89fe3ca4c_story.html
In support of sabotage inefficacy:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/5/17198362/obamacare-enrollment-2018-trump-sabotaging
Have not read all of the Duke guy's work.
PK:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/07/opinion/republicans-obamacare-health-care.html
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/blog/2018/apr/health-coverage-erosion
https://www.cbpp.org/sabotage-watch-tracking-efforts-to-undermine-the-aca
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/study-trumps-aca-sabotage-to-leave-millions-more-uninsured.html
"Trump has effectively replaced Obamacare with a federal health-care program that’s nearly identical — except that it covers fewer people, charges higher premiums, and costs the government more money."
older, probably a prehash therefore:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/opinion/obamacare-trump.html
Anyone can pick and choose figures; they give no more information than blind men looking at an elephant. My own health care costs may be increasing more rapidly now, but one can't infer from a subset of the population (here, one person) that health costs are accelerating broadly.
"Of course you know Price's comment" - which had to do with what some people will pay for insurance. Insurance is not health care; it is just one component of the cost of health care. Price is talking only about the few who buy individual insurance.
"Charges higher premiums" - for a minority of the few (7%) who buy individual insurance. For the majority of the few, the ones who get premium subsidies on exchanges, their premiums are rising more slowly or even falling. A counterintuitive side effect of the government eliminating CSR subsidies (but not eliminating CSRs).
"Costs the government more money" - because, net, government subsidies go up. But do the changes actually cost the nation more money (i.e. increase health costs), or do they merely shift costs from individuals to the government? And isn't that the idea of health care as a right?
Judging from the URLs themselves, the Commonwealth Fund and CBPP pages are concerned with how coverage has been reduced. As I've already commented, reducing coverage reduces utilization which reduces national health spending.
You've tossed out a lot of URLs, pointing to pages that talk about lots of parts of health costs (insurance, coverage, utilization) and how some payers (e.g. government, unsubsidized individual policy subscribers) are affected, but you haven't said anything about how this is accelerating the rise in "health costs".
So again I ask what you mean by "health costs".
Edit: If you do a search for health care cost containment, you'll find some ACA changes mentioned, like the Cadillac tax and the medical loss ratio (MLR) requirement for insurers. The former never went into effect, so you can't credit it with flattening health care costs. The latter is still in effect (and I've gotten multiple premium refunds thanks to this provision).
So in addition to describing what you mean by health costs, it would be informative to know what provisions of the law, that formerly helped contain those costs however you define them, were subsequently sabotaged by the GOP.
That was not a 'toss', though, and I am not a googling troll (I'm not saying this is your accusation). But I am intensely curious about the deep details, as are you too, clearly, indeed; yet I lack your sometimes seemingly automatically reactionary certainties.
And I tend to trust studied expertise, which it seems much of the time you are not.
As I have said before more than once, if you really are as informed and canny and smartly 'yeah-but' as you present, you really, really should be posting elsewhere in addition.
However, I still want to know if he's actually taking it. And many others.
I'm not wriggling out of describing what the term means to me. I wrote that one could view it as the (average) cost of services, or the total amount spent by the country for services. I suggested researching "cost containment". I added commentary on that.
Most of what you cited discusses health insurance costs. Is that what you mean by "health costs"? Are you giving the same answer as Trump: [What does that mean, sir?] "You can figure that out yourself."
Vox does mention "medical costs", as in "a silver plan ... covers 70 percent of medical costs." That sounds like health costs. Are these the costs that you say have been sabotaged? Vox doesn't talk about medical costs rising.
Though it does confirm what I wrote previously. Trump actions effectively "increased the size of subsidies Obamacare customers received, which often made bronze plans free for people or made gold plans even cheaper than their less generous alternatives."
Insurance is basically a mechanism for redistributing costs (and risks). Subsidies likewise redistribute costs - if the government pays your premiums, or if the insurer (formerly the government) subsidizes your deductibles/copays (CSRs), then you pay less but someone (taxpayers, other policy holders) pays more.
Insurance is not primarily about the cost of health care - it's about who pays for it. "Sabotage" insurance and health costs get distributed differently. That's not an increase in "health costs", though it has certainly resulted in my personal cost of health care increasing. Just as it has resulted in cheaper gold plans for others.
Medicare premiums may be as close as one can get to an accurate representation of the true cost of health care. No games here about who's in and who's out. Nearly everyone over 65 opts in, and relatively few under age 65 are eligible (e.g. a disability may qualify you).
By law, the base amount you pay for part B is 1/4 of its cost. (High income people may pay an IRMAA surcharge.) So that premium has risen in sync with health care costs, nothing like the headlines you're seeing for exchange plan premiums.
As a single payer system, Medicare applies a lot of pressure to keep costs down. In addition, AFAIK, the ACA Medicare cost containment provisions are still in place. https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/the-facts-on-medicare-spending-and-financing/
There's also the "hold harmless" provision tying Medicare premiums to SS benefits. So long as you're not paying a premium surcharge (IRMAA) because you have a high income, you are guaranteed that your SS check will not go down from year to year because you're paying increasing Medicare premiums out of your SS benefit. (Your check may not go up for years, but at least it won't drop.)
IMHO the bigger problem is Part D. I've looked at 2018 insurance rate filings - they all say that something like 2/3 - 3/4 of the increase in health costs is coming from increases in drug prices. There are a couple of obvious things the government could do.
For Medicare specifically, let Medicare negotiate prices, just as it does for health care services. More generally, allow the reimportation of drugs. This is currently illegal, but current government policy is not to enforce that prohibition strictly when importing 90 days or less of drugs for personal use only. (Not that I'm advocating breaking the law.)
Unfortunately, I don't expect to see these changes anytime soon. About the only improvement coming down the pike is a gradual closing of the doughnut hole. This is yet another Medicare-specific ACA provision to contain health costs. In fact, one that the current Congress improved by accelerating the timeline to get rid of the hole a year ahead of schedule.
Overall, not the rosiest picture, but to paraphrase an old punchline, having this personal budgeting problem is better than the alternative.
So you have studied all of those articles and that's your conclusion: it's trees not forest?
One wonders whether any of the Congresscritters understand what they're doing: https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/medigap-reform-setting-the-context/
Uh, Reinhardt and others typically look to Kaiser and Milliman totals projections, no?
Insurance is large part, natch. Costs of healthcare (not insurance) are bending, I read. Is your general point that the costs of healthcare are ... what? Doing okay? So why is that?
This is kinda dated.
https://www.healthinsurancegeeks.com/2013/08/30/the-central-challenge-in-u-s-health-policy-by-uwe-e-reinhardt/
But maybe the question can be posed to these residents, or to their reps. Yes, it's chiefly about who pays, so far as I can see.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/virginia-senate-approves-medicaid-expansion-to-400000-low-income-residents/2018/05/30/5df5e304-640d-11e8-a768-ed043e33f1dc_story.html
I actually am not seeing that the earlier articles I cited missed the forest for the trees.
https://billmoyers.com/story/resurrecting-another-big-lie-myth-social-security-ponzi-scheme/
the 'pro' arg, pretty stupid imo, but for balance:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2017/04/04/sure-social-securitys-a-ponzi-scheme-but-is-it-a-sustainable-one-or-not/
The intent was to address concerns of old age, poverty, unemployment, and retirement. It had the very noble intent of providing a pension to families (needy or otherwise). Of course around the time of the Vietnam war, some a-hole politician pondered, 'hey, look at all that money over there'!!!! And, the rest was history. So much for the noble idea. Now its just a slush fund of empty promises and corruption.
So I see what you are saying when you mean it depends on future contribution on others. However, so many other things also do the same? What is the difference between Income Tax and Social Security "tax" and Medicare "tax". Isn't is semantics? We tend to use the word "withholding", but everything is a tax. If all of us stopped paying taxes then Government "ponzi scheme" would collapse, no?
The idea behind SS was a "social contract". Now I know that sounds abhorrent to some. However, consider if congress does not keep spending the surplus and hadn't done so historically for years, SS wouldn't have been in trouble today. So if we want to lay blame for this "ponzi scheme" then let's lay it at the hands of those specifically responsible for it. Calling it "slush" and "corrupt" is your opinion, and I can accept that.
Nearly all the links you have provided have focused on the former, including the latest reporting on how Republicans in Virginia have moved to have the government pick up most of the health care costs of some of its citizens (by expanding Medicaid coverage).
As you just linked to a 2013 article, and seem to be fond of Krugman, it seems appropriate to look at what he said about health costs at the end of 2013. He wrote: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/29/opinion/krugman-obamacares-secret-success.html
So he viewed health costs as something different (i.e. in addition to) making insurance affordable. He surely wasn't saying that government subsidies or forcing healthy people to buy exchange plans were "bending the curve". They didn't exist when he wrote this column!
The Milliman study referenced in your link doesn't even agree with Krugman that the ACA as of the same date was "bending the curve" at all: "Since the passage of the ACA, we have seen little direct impact of the act for our typical family of four." And in Figure 10, it shows various major elements of the ACA as having little impact on the cost of care ("neutral"), an unknown effect ("?"), or increasing costs.
" Insurance is large part [of health costs], natch."
It's not clear whether Krugman even counts health insurance premiums as part of health costs (the Milliman study doesn't; neither do the CMS or OECD, except a small part, indirectly). ISTM that whatever you regard as health costs is different from how many others define health costs.
That brings us back to the unanswered question: What do you mean by "health costs" in your writing: "health costs are flattening, or were until GOP sabotage"?
Unmentioned is the fact that around the time of the Iraq war, some a-hole politician pondered, "let's just do this... who cares about how we pay for it?"
Taken together, the two examples suggest that a-hole politicians really don't much give a damn where the money is coming from, but then, that was hardly a secret.
The amount of money floating in the American monetary system is hardly a specific fixed amount, but varies from year to year, depending upon the totality of the operations of the government monetary system. When money is being added to the system, the actual point of entry also varies. Social Security is projected to have a shortfall sometime in the next twenty years or so. What's to prevent using the SS system as the point of entry for "new" money as it's added into the system? And please don't fall back on the worn-out shibboleth that this would immediately cause rampant inflation, because that is flatly not true.