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One is health insurance that borders on welfare and the other is welfare.
Because they are provided by the government. :shrug: As is Social Security.
Medicare is not paid for like Social Security.
....yeah.... it's not like Medicare is a pay-go system designed to protect the elderly from impoverishment, paid for through payroll taxes.....
There is nothing in the dictionary about sudden or catastrophic in the definition of insurance. My annual doctors visit is neither sudden or catastrophic and it is covered.
Sure, and when it is so, then your insurance isn't acting as insurance, but rather as a socialized pre-payment program. The shift from "insurance" to socialized pre-payment is a major driver in skyrocketing health "insurance" rates, price rates, and providers being minimally responsive to patients. Third-party-payments are a major problem in our healthcare industry, not a boon.
Cancer may be catastrophic, but it can last 10 years which is not sudden.
It's also a risk that we each have, but which we cannot anticipate individually. Which is why we transfer that risk through insurance.
Turning 65 isn't a risk. It's not a catastrophic cost that can't be individually anticipated. It's not an insurable event.
Insurance is a hedge against the cost of the unknown. Turning 65 isn't really what Social Security is about. It is really about turning 90 or 95.
:shrug: if that were true, then payments would start at age 90 or 95, instead of 62, 65, or 67.
Social Security is suppose to provide a predictable stream of liquidity so that seniors can plan their retirement
It is supposed to provide them with protection against poverty.
Like any insurance, SS is not intended to pay the entirety of your retirement costs
Unless of course by circumstance outside your control, or unforeseeable, you arrive at that point with no savings. After all, that is what insurance does - it reimburses our costs and transfers risk.
However, if SS simply gives us a stream of revenue for the act of managing to age to 62..... well, then, it's not insurance, but something else. In this case it's a very, very, badly structured socialized retirement program intended to protect seniors from poverty, but which actually has the effect of helping to keep them in it.
The idea that we need to have people who are in poverty, subsidizing those to the tune of 125% above poverty, is a reason to say that SS isn't insurance.
If you are in the top half of income earners, and your benefit would be slowed, then you are not - by definition - in poverty.