SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE POLICY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF GENERATIONAL ACCOUNTING by Alan
نویسندگان
چکیده
Our'previous study (Auerbach, Gokhale, and Kotlikoff [1991]) introduced the concept of generational accounting, a method of determining how the burden of fiscal policy falls on different generations. It found that U.S. fiscal policy is out of balance in terms of projected generational burdens. This means that either current generations will bear a larger share (than we project under current law) of the burden of the government's spending, or that future generations will have to pay, on average, at least 21 percent more on a growth-adjusted basis than will those generations who have just been born. These conclusions were based on relatively optimistic assumptions about the path of Social Security and Medicare policies, namely that the accumulation of a Social Security trust fund would continue and that Medicare costs would not rise as a share of GNP. In this paper, we simulate the effects of realistic alternative paths for Social Security and Medicare. Our results suggest that such alternative policies could greatly increase the imbalance in generational policy, making not only future generations pay significantly more, but current young Americans as well. For example, continued expansion of Medicare in this decade alone could double the 21-percent imbalance figure if its bill is shifted primarily to future generations. clevelandfed.org/research/workpaper/index.cfm
منابع مشابه
Generational Aspects of Medicare.
This paper examines the generational aspect of the current Medicare system and some stylized reforms. We find that the rates of return on Medicare for today’s workers are higher than those for Social Security and that the Medicare system is shifting a greater share of the burden on future workers than is Social Security. Nonetheless, the rates of return on Medicare, using the Medicare Trustees ...
متن کاملProtecting Medicare: the best defense is a good offense.
Traditional Medicare is being threatened from two political directions. The current Republican coalition, on the right, simply dislikes social insurance in principle. It seeks privatization for its own sake. Another perspective, centrist and well established among political and economic elites, worries that the program is "unaffordable," whatever its basic merits. Defenders of traditional Medic...
متن کاملProjected U.S. Demographics and Social Security
Without policy reforms, the aging of the U.S. population is likely to increase the burden of the currently unfunded Social Security and Medicare systems. In this paper we build an applied general equilibrium model and incorporate the population projections made by the Social Security Administration (SSA) to evaluate the macroeconomic and welfare implications of alternative fiscal responses to t...
متن کاملImagining Medicare: Visions of the Future
Medicare’s salience to health policy and American politics is suffi ciently obvious that it needs no explanation. Yet scholarly attention to Medicare has never matched its fi scal and political signifi cance. Medicare has long been on the margins of political science, while book-length treatments of Medicare policy have been rare. That relative obscurity, though, is about to end. To date, atten...
متن کاملHow raising the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare might affect the disability insurance and Medicare programs.
The normal age of retirement is scheduled to increase to 67 by 2022, and several proposals to increase it to age 70 are being considered. The Medicare eligibility age is not scheduled to increase under current law, but proposals to raise it in step with the retirement age were recently considered by the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare (1999). This article examines how r...
متن کامل