That’s correct. If you have a statistically significant medical diagnosis that predicts a shorter lifespan, you should use that information to inform your Social Security choices. But most people aren’t “blessed” with that kind of certainty on their longevity. All you can do is use the numbers for the whole population.
Basically what the UCLA study says is that the people who use “Grandma’s advice”, “a bird in the hand”, or “everyone in my family is dead by 75”, instead of arithmetic are leaving trillions of dollars on the table. The average person tends to believe that they are smarter than they really are, and underestimate their longevity.
Noble Prize winner Daniel Kahneman wrote a whole book on the subject.
Medicaid and “other Gov’t spending” doesn’t come out of the Social Security trust fund which is currently estimated to run dry by 2035. It’s the bankruptcy of the trust fund that’s causing people to predict the 21% cut in benefits.
That does not mean what you think it does. That is very often for when a senior goes into a nursing home. The Medicare is dropped. The state/federal government takes over with Medicaid.
As of 2019, there were over 12 million dual eligible Medicare/Medicaid beneficiaries. That’s both people in nursing homes and folks not in nursing homes who are too poor to pay their Medicare premium and co-pays.
I assume that there are even more of these people in 2025.
Yes but the expensive nursing home bills go only to Medicaid. At that point it does not matter much if you have dual Medicare/Medicaid. You only need Medicaid.
Medicaid, other, and SS … all get paid from the same place. The “trust fund” is merely an accounting device to keep track of the numbers. There’s no “fund” anywhere.
Yes. On a macro basis money is fungible and all it comes out of the same pot. But politically the focus is on the status of the imaginary “Social Security trust fund”.
It’s like “trickle down” – it just depends on what you can get people to believe. The only reason the system survives is the ignorance and innumeracy of the “governed”.
A big reason that Social Security (and the rest of the Gov’t) is going broke is the trillions of dollars we’ve incinerated in the Middle East over the past 40 years and the lack of taxation on the wealthy (i.e., a larger and larger portion of the nation’s income it taxed at low “Leisure Class” rates rather than wage & salary income.
How would the planned Medicaid work requirement impact the people on both Medicare and Medicaid? Just because you’re over 65 does not necessarily mean you are too feeble to work.
The people pushing a Medicaid work requirement in Michigan, on the last go around conceded the program would cost more to police than it would save in refusing benefits, but cutting cost was not the objective. The objective, stated by the bill’s sponsors, was to force more people into the “job” market, because the “JCs” were crying “no-one wanna work”, and that was before the post-plague labor “shortage”.
Shirkey said that, for him, adding a training or work requirement to the state’s Medicaid policy is not ultimately about controlling the costs of one of the state’s largest expenses.
“The reason to do it is that because it’s the right thing to do,” Shirkey said. “I don’t know of a single business that isn’t looking for people to come to work. … The best way to make more money is to have a job in the first place.”
That got me thinking. What’s an extremely dangerous hobby that would prompt you to take SS at age 62?
The only one I could come up with is “climbing Mt. Everest” (i.e. 1% chance of death for those that make an attempt, and oddly a 5% death rate for those that reach the summit (they were too tired to safely climb back down.)
I was surprised that the $175/yr premium I paid for a $1 MM liability policy for piloting a small aircraft was about half the $300/year I paid for $300,000 liability coverage on my automobile (plus I have a $5 MM umbrella liability policy.)
Buying a Harley and riding from bar to bar without a helmet seems to be the way they do it here. Taking SS early gives them more money for chrome and beer.
“Buying a Harley and riding from bar to bar without a helmet seems to be the way they do it here”
in my neck of the woods, snowmobiling is popular. They ride the trails and all the trails eventually go by a Bar. So, have a few drinks, then hop back on a rocket, and blast down twisty, wooded trails that feature 2-way traffic with blind corners, lol.
There are multiple deaths every year. I gave it up after having some near death experiences, went back to xc skiing. Nobody is ever drunk on the xc ski trails,lol, they’d be puking their guts out if they attempted it. A beer is reserved for afterwards,lol, not during the effort.
Probably only those that insurance companies decline to take on. Like skydiving, cave diving, car racing, etc. Insurance companies are really good at assessing risk and probability, that’s why they hire the best actuaries they can find.
“we average about a dozen snowmobile fatalities a year, about the same number as boating deaths.”
in Michigan, we tongue in cheek call boating “day drinking”.
Some of the craziest things I’ve ever seen were on a friends boat, either launching or taking out, and watching drunk people try to get their boat on the trailer. It’s no secret,either, LEO knows what is going on, but they seem to ignore it, till there are incidents. The local business owners know that nobody spends money like drunken boaters,lol.
I only boat a couple of times a year, find kayaking rivers a lot more fun, and safer,too.