<snip>The corporate CEO crew is also considering a plan to raise the normal retirement age for Social Security to 69. And, they want to reduce the benefit formula for high-income workers, which, incredibly, they define as people who earn more than $40,000 a year.
Their main trick for Medicare is to raise the age of eligibility from 65 to 67. Apparently, our CEO gang has not discovered that the health insurance market for older people is a disaster. They also continue to promote the misconception that the problem is Medicare and Medicaid.
These programs are actually much more efficient than private insurers. The real problem is our private-sector health care system which already costs more than twice as much per person as the average in other wealthy countries, with few obvious benefits in outcomes.
The scary budget projections that our CEOs like to tout assume that health care costs will exceed 20 percent of gross domestic product in a decade. That would imply costs of more than $34,000 for a family of four in today's economy. And these costs are projected to keep growing through time.
The normal response to this situation would be to focus on the need to fix the health care system. But many of Pearlstein's CEOs profit from the waste in the health care system, so they would rather cut our Medicare benefits.
So there you have it, the richest people in the country - the big gainers from economic growth over the last three decades - have plans to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for current and future retirees.
So there you have it, the richest people in the country - the big gainers from economic growth over the last three decades - have plans to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for current and future retirees.<snip>
