John Stossel says Social Security is in trouble, and so is Medicare.
He is of the belief that there aren’t enough working individuals to sustain all the old folks that are living longer than ever.
He believes it’s going to go bankrupt soon and our elected leaders lack the courage to take action. or even discuss it. They just kick the can down the road.
He notes that in an effort to save his nation’s pension system from becoming bankrupt, France’s president recently increased the retirement age from 62 to a pitiful 64.
Since then, the citizenry has been in an uproar.
In America, the elderly yell at politicians who even suggest such remedies. Stossel claims that when the elderly say, “Don’t touch my retirement savings!” because they paid in for years and want their money back, they are being ignorant. He says it’s not their money. It is the money of the young.
Stossel claims that most senior citizens receive quadruple what they’ve paid in.
He said a government retirement plan made financial sense when Social Security was introduced. The majority of Americans didn’t even make it to age 65. Only a small proportion of people qualified for Social Security.
However, today’s Americans live an average of 76 years. There just aren’t enough employees to support the old because the majority of people live such long lives, and politicians, who are vying for votes, won’t say it in public.
By 2034, reserve monies are expected to be depleted.
The reserves for Medicare will exhaust much sooner.
Stossel says part of the problem is that older people have lots of medical tests performed on them and they accept whatever price the tests are because they aren’t paying for it.
Older adults who browse shops for dollar-saving grocery deals, Stossel says, seldom compare prices for MRIs or cardiac operations. “What’s the point? Someone else makes the payment.
Medicare is like a ticking time bomb.
“Sooner or later, it will blow up,” predicts economist Dan Mitchell of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. According to Mitchell, either the government will reduce their benefits or it will start rationing healthcare all of a sudden. Or the reimbursement rates would be so low that no hospital or doctor will accept you as a patient.
