Social Security and Medicare

Abstract

With the retirement of baby boomers set to begin within a decade, concerns about the solvency of the two pillars of social insurance in the United States have gained heightened scrutiny in recent years. Social Security, created in 1935, and Medicare, added in 1965, unarguably have nurtured widespread expectations that the federal government bears an obligation to care for the elderly. Much of the public, however, is not attentive to funding arrangements for these programs. The intergenerational aspect of Medicare and Social Security funding eludes many Americans, as polling evidence reported in Baggette, Shapiro, and Jacobs (1995) indicates. Among the majority of the public who do grasp this concept, there appears to be a mixture of denial and dread about what is to become of their long-promised safety net in their golden years. Building on two articles from the mid-1990s (Baggette, Shapiro, and Jacobs 1995; Jacobs, Shapiro, and Schulman 1993), we present longitudinal public opinion data on Social Security and Medicare from the mid-1990s to early 2004. The wealth of public opinion data available over the past decade forced us to take a selective approach to inclusion here. In addition to the long-standing questions about the solvency of these programs, several new issues have arisen in recent years, including calls for partial privatization of Social Security, strenuous debates over the future of the program, prescription drug coverage under Medicare, and the implications of rising healthcare costs more generally. We track public opinion on some of these more recent topics, as well as some enduring questions of spending priorities, confidence in politicians to protect these programs, and more general retirement planning issues. Several patterns emerge. Americans have grown somewhat more optimistic about Social Security's and Medicare's future since the mid-1990s, even amid evidence to the contrary. Generally, polls suggest that Americans continue to be deeply divided on the idea of partial privatization of Social Security, specifically on the idea of individualized investment of a portion of Social Security taxes. The public remains strongly opposed to investment in stocks by the