It’s an ever-retreating target. I’ve been worried about the loss of income and the sudden increase in health care costs, so I’ve been deferring it, which is no favor to my students given how ancient I am (or, alternatively, it’s a benefit because if I were to leave, the administration wouldn’t replace me for years, if at all.) I might as well give up on the fantasy, if the Republicans get their way.
Note that Trump recently threatened social security and medicare.
The Trump campaign was in full damage control last week after the former president called in to CNBC and suggested making cuts from Medicare and Social Security, which offer financial care to retired Americans or those with a disability.
But, you say, that was just Trump, who is insane, and his campaign is backpedaling fast.
Except that the Republican party is pushing for the same thing!
A new budget by a large and influential group of House Republicans calls for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and restructuring Medicare.
The proposals, which are unlikely to become law this year, reflect how many Republicans will seek to govern if they win the 2024 elections. And they play into a fight President Joe Biden is seeking to have with former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party as he runs for re-election.
I’m eligible to retire right now, but maybe in a few years I won’t be old enough. It won’t be because I’m getting younger — time doesn’t work that way.
The GOP will never wreck Social Security and Medicare.
Well, actually they will if they can.
What they won’t do is tell you what they are going to do.
It will be a surprise.
The GOP will “privatize” Social Security and Medicare.
The will “restructure” and “reform” and “improve” those programs.
The end result of privatizing and “modernizing” Social Security and Medicare will be their functional destruction.
.1. They will grandfather in current Social Security and Medicare recipients.
In other words they will buy off the old people who vote.
It will hit the young people the hardest but they won’t know what hit them for years and decades.
PS: Social Security has already been privatized any way and a long time ago.
We call those programs 401(K) plans, IRAs, and Roth IRAs.
A huge number of people have them and they are a good deal.
So they just want to stick it to the youngs, reinforcing the view that the GOP is the party for old white men.
But just think – after you retire, you won’t have to go to the university any more, giving you more time to monetize your web presence to supplement your retirement.
There has to be sufficient funds for you to retire.
Do it!
Make it work.
Never look back.
Good luck and enjoy a new life. I did it with not much and it’s been just fine and kinda fun for the last 12 years.
Medicare or Medicare Advantage for you at less than $200/mo and same for Mary or MNsure marketplace at about the same cost if she’s not old enough. I guess there’s a reason this doesn’t work for you, but, yeah, I’d really like to see you enjoying retirement if you can. You only live once and all that.
The GOP has already privatized a good deal of Social Security in the form of IRAs, 403(b)s, and similar plans, all while holding Social Security at low levels. They probably will “grandfather” in Social Security for the grandparents, at least that’s what they have done so far, but making it increasingly necessary for workers, particularly young ones, to set up private plans to fund their retirement. Of course, these plans become enormous capital pools for the fund managers to profit from. And if due to lax government monitoring some crooks rip off a fund, or just make bad investment decisions so the fund goes bust, then what? The poor folks who paid into it are left with pennies on their dollars, or the Federal government steps in and covers the loss.
It’s a ridiculous complicated system primarily set up for the skimmers to skim.
charley @4, Medicare Advantage is a scam. Once you really need it they have bazzililon reasons to refuse coverage.
Anat has it right.
Medicare Advantage isn’t an addition to Medicare.
It is to replace Medicare.
You know, to privatize Medicare.
And it works until you get seriously sick.
Then, the companies do everything to deny coverage.
A better addition are Medicare Gap or Supplement plans that really are additions to Medicare.
It’s schrodinger’s social security – we are getting rid of it, and not getting rid of it. Maybe they’ll just say what they really want: keep it for the white people….
@6 & 7 Kaiser P. lured me into their MA plan with freebies and a convenient nearby location, but I am concerned about being at the mercy of an industry I don’t trust. My friends recommended it, but we’re healthy now. I will definitely consider changing to standard Medicare plus gap insurance next next year.
charley @ #9 — When profit is the motif, it’s difficult to trust their medical decisions. They make money by taking your money to provide services, then denying you coverage of the services your doctor says you need. It’s a well recognized and documented problem. And there’s large sums of money involved.
Then there’s just the incompetence of the safety nets the insurers have in place to prevent procedures. A few years ago my doctors recommended I have an aortic valve replacement. I had two choices: open heart surgery, which would have probably ended my career, or a relatively new procedure…a TAVR…which basically meant a day in the hospital. So, you know way cheaper and I could get back to work in weeks rather than months, if ever. My insurance, which is paid for through my job, denied coverage for the TAVR valve. When a doctor got through to a doctor at the insurance company, he was told that the TAVR was not covered because it was not approved by the FDA. My doctor politely told the insurance doctor that the TAVR was FDA approved. A few weeks later I had the TAVR procedure and was back at work a month later. The point is that the insurance companies are geared to denying coverage while staying informed about treatments is down the priority list.
You’ll still be old enough to retire: In these proposed plans, usually they aren’t really proposing to raise the age at which you are eligible, rather they are tweaking the benefits formula so that you get less benefits, by modifying the “reference” age used in the benefits linear interpolation. Your SS benefits will still max out at 70 years old, you’ll just get less money.
Do you not have a pension plan with health coverage at the University? oO After all your years there, SS should be extra income, not replacement income.
Reps have been working to ruin SS for a long time. The fund is running out of money and that has been clear for at least 30 years. Small tax increases back then would have saved it but the Reps fought against them tooth and nail and, to a large degree, succeeded. I have always felt the underlying objective was to use the funding issues as a way to either get rid of SS or seriously reduce it. Why older folks (I’m 77) consistently vote for the Reps is a mystery to me.
This is the culmination of the trickle down strategy put in place 43 years ago by Reagan. Return to the good old dsys before Teddy Roosevelt strated reining in the Robber Baron economy.
@ raven
[blockquote]We call those programs 401(K) plans, IRAs, and Roth IRAs.
A huge number of people have them and they are a good deal.[/blockquote]
I rather differ in that opinion, in most cases you have zero real control, other than assigning vague changes in risk, to whether or not those actually make money over time, they are not really protected, in case of the company that they are tied to going under, and they are dependent 100% on the freaking stock market as to whether or not they utterly crash along with it or not. That isn’t a “good deal”, and they exist 100% entirely because companies, who had no real problem, back when they got tax breaks for creating real pensions, of offering something that was protected and guaranteed, gave up those break in favor of funneling money into 401ks and the like. Now IRAs are a bit different, since you have more control over them, but they are still risky, not certain. And, as to the 401ks… if companies where not getting more out of it then employees, including the ability to declare backruptcy, or restructure, or just go under, without the fat cats at the top “losing” anything, because they have to pay out pensions, then they would never have pushed for them.
They are, literally, just one more example of, “Well, we found a way to parachute out when the plane caught fire, but.. its just too bad everyone currently, or previously, working for us are going down with the plane! Its so sad, but not at all our fault!”
Basically though, I don’t consider any method of gambling my retirement, no matter what promises I am made that it will never go wrong, as a “good thing”. At some point, almost inevitably, its not going to be a good freaking thing for someone – and an example of that would be my brother, who worked, for a number of years, for a company that murdered 3 different “retirement plans”, in almost as many years, with my brother having, due to all the overtime he worked, put quite a bit into them, because somehow the company had to be “restructured” every X number of years (the allowed by law between such bs), and the only people that got anything out of this was, ding, ding, ding, the top level execs, who all got golden parachute retirements out of it, before the next batch of crooks took over, and planned the next derailment.
Companies do not “but into” idea because it profits their employees, at least not 99% of them, and they where both the proponents of, and remain the 100% endorsers of the idea that your “retirement” should be something managed by someone else, which they put almost no money in, have no responsibility for, and you can lose if the related stocks crash, because the people in charge of those “retirement funds”, make stupid decisions. It leaves them nearly 100% without any liability when it all goes to the hell. Super convenient…
I’m glad to see warnings about Medicare Advantage programs here. My husband is about to retire after 43 years of service in the DOD, as an Active Duty officer, as a Reserve officer, and recently as a civilian employee.
One thing that we’ve learned in our research is that the advantage programs are neither Medicare nor any kind of advantage.
We found that if we give up FedBlue insurance (same thing that the congress critters have), we would also lose TRICARE (earned by my officer husband retiring from the military). We would then be at the mercy of the Medicare Advantage program.
We’re keeping FedBlue as our Medi-Gap insurance, with TRICARE as the back-up. Those two will cover us for anything, even if we’re traveling to see kids and grandkids or even traveling overseas. My husband can also take advantage of VA care, since he’s a disabled Veteran.
I try to warn anyone who will listen to avoid those so-called advantage programs.