We must do something to cut down the costs. The consequence of people living on a fixed income and not getting medical checkups while they're still reasonably healthy is not something I want to see continued.
Better to get blood pressure advice, nutrition advice, diabetes checks.....these are things that are silent diseases that if treated early can prolong good health.
You are directly insinuating that people are too stupid to take care of themselves and have no clue as to which lifestyles they lead are healthy or not.
Just because some Govt programs are so entrenched does not mean they can not and should not be incrementalized away just as they were foisted upon us by elites buying votes with OPM in direct conflict with Govt's original mandate of protecting our pre-existing natural rights. Free peoples plan their own lives - we don't need no stinkin "legislators" thinking for us. ALL Fedl programs should be summarily phased out - and only those with merit enough should be transferred to the states where they always belonged to begin with, and where the voters, NOT the SCOTUS, are the arbitors of legislation THEY, not big business influenced pols, deems necessary to themselves.
Read this great essay please!:
http://www.mises.org/story/2060
BTW, I would guess you're a boomer. If so, then why have you not known, as I have for about 30 years at minimum, that SS was a bad deal and probably wouldn't be there for us anyway?
This isn't new. So those many people who have known have had to make other retirement arrangements that view SS as the mere supplement it always was from it's inception. Who in their right minds ever thought it was to be one's sole source of retirement income? No one I've ever met.
Those ignorant enough to believe they can make it on SS alone are of the same duped socialist leaning breed who re-elected FDR 3x.
Look, SS is but a Democrat re-election slush fund. The difference between SS revenues and outlays has NOT been invested to compound since the worker/retiree ratio was 44:1 in the beginning, and which difference, even if only invested in T-bills, by now would have had the long term benefit of compounding so as to make the system self supporting by now.
I wouldn't have near the problem with it IF politicians hadn't been raiding it from the beginning and it was instead compounding in a trust fund decreased only by benefits paid.
That it has been rifled to buy votes and used to expand other Govt fiascos should tell you something, besides it's being the constitutionally illegal redistribution of incomes denied by the Equal Protection clause.
FDR's stacked courts rewrote the constitution - the previous courts having shot down almost every socialist unconstitutional New Deal boondoggle that came before.
At 53 I'd opt out given the chance to have only the money I put in back right now. I can certainly grow it faster than the dismal and criminal sub-2% SS return we are stuck with now.
Do you know where the idea of Govt pensions came from? Or graduated and high tax rates, or Govt run schools, or the redistribution of incomes?