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Administration officials said polls consistently showed that the majority of Americans believed that Social Security was in long-term financial trouble and that younger Americans wanted the freedom to opt for personal retirement accounts.
Pollsters at the Pew Research for People and the Press said late last week that support for Bush's plan had fallen among 18-29 year-olds. Young adults had been the proposal's strongest supporters but backing from this age group fell from seven in 10 last December to just under half this month, the poll said.
But is all the attention to Social Security misplaced? So said the independent trustees and a number of analysts and policymakers.
Social Security provides retirement, survivor, and disability income for 47.6 million Americans. Medicare provides healthcare for 41.7 million older and disabled people.
While Social Security benefits were expected to exceed tax revenue by 2017, Medicare's trust fund reached that point last year. The trustees projected the Social Security trust fund would be exhausted by 2041 but Medicare's trust will be depleted by 2020.
By 2024, Medicare's cost would have surpassed Social Security's and would have made the healthcare program the government's most expensive item outside the defense budget, said Palmer and Saving, a strong supporter of Bush's private investment accounts.
The government would have to put aside $11.1 trillion today to finance Social Security's promised benefits indefinitely, they said. But just the new Medicare prescription drug benefit included in the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act carries $18.2 trillion in new commitments with no matching funds and this overhang has been projected out infinitely.
Those numbers have energized groups ranging from the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis, which has assailed the White House for undermining Medicare with un-funded mandates only to go after Social Security, to the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), which sounded its own alarm over Medicare in a recent report.
''Rising healthcare costs pose a much larger threat to living standards than any potential tax increases for supporting Social Security,'' CEPR said.
''While healthcare costs pose a problem everywhere, no other country has such a failed healthcare system,'' the Washington, D.C.-based think tank added. ''The United States pays more than twice as much [per] person for healthcare as other wealthy countries, yet it has shorter life expectancies. Rising healthcare costs pose an enormous threat to the federal budget, as was illustrated in the new Medicare trustees' report, but more importantly they pose a threat to the economy and future living standards.''
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