Stop Social Security, Medicare insolvency

The editorial “Social in-security looms,” Oct. 17, highlighting the looming crisis with the Social Security and Medicare Hospital Trust Funds, presents a very dim future but rightly notes that there are various solutions.

The threat of insolvency has been known for decades, but former presidents and congresses have been too scared to act. With a deeply polarized landscape, one would think this is not a time to tackle what many see as an insoluble issue.

However, facing a Social Security crisis in a similarly polarized era in 1983, President Ronald Reagan, who had long scorned Social Security, and House Speaker Tip O’neill demonstrated that bipartisan action can be productive when they agreed to establish the National Commission on Social Security Reform to examine how to cope with the system’s long-term challenges and extend the solvency of the trust fund. The commission offered a compromise that resulted in extending the trust fund’s solvency for a couple of generations through recommending actions subsequently passed into law, including raising the amount of earnings subject to taxation and raising the full retirement age gradually to 67.

Social Security has often been viewed by elected officials as the “third rail” never to be touched. But if the system itself fails, those officials will have to answer to older retirees, surviving widows and children, the disabled and all their family members. Another “third rail,” perhaps? They need to stop kicking the can down the road. Now is the time for bipartisan action to ensure the future of Social Security.

Bob O’connell

Clifton Park