The cost to employers of providing their workers with health insurance has remained fairly stable for years. At first blush, this seems like good news for workers. When benefit costs rise, employers tend to take it out of their employees’ wages. But as costs stabilized, health insurance no longer exerted the downward pressure on paychecks that it did back in the 1990s. This had the added advantage of halting the erosion of wages on which Social Security levies its payroll tax. But to fully understand what all of this meant for workers requires digging into why employers’ insurance costs, measured as a percentage of workers’ total compensation, stabilized. A recent study delved into this question by examining the period 1996…

The families of more than 1 million children and teenagers with serious physical and intellectual disabilities are receiving Supplemental Security Income, or SSI. But a 1996 reform made it harder to keep those benefits when the child turns 18. The 18-year-olds who don’t meet the tougher requirement for eligibility lose not only SSI’s monthly cash payments but potentially the Medicaid health insurance that usually goes with it. Anywhere from 20 percent to nearly half of all 18-year-olds lose their SSI, depending on the state where they live. New research by Priyanka Anand at George Mason University shows that adults who had likely lost their benefits at 18 have fewer diagnoses of a range of health conditions than people who turned…

While the cost of elder care in the United States, whether paid for by Medicare, Medicaid or out-of-pocket, is substantial, most care is provided by family members for no compensation. Yet the burden on those family members can also be huge in terms of forgoing paid employment or work opportunities, time with family and friends, and general exhaustion. An issue brief recently published by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College examines these costs, policies that can support family caregivers, and their preferences as expressed in focus groups. Here are some of its findings: In 2021, there were about 38 million family caregivers in the United States who are estimated to have provided 36 billion hours of assistance to their family…

If providing healthcare to more Americans is the goal, the COVID-era tax credits for people buying insurance on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces have been a big success. Enrollment in ACA policies has doubled to a record 24 million since 2021, when Congress approved the credits, which reduced monthly premiums by hundreds of dollars and ensured that health insurance was affordable during the pandemic. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 extended the subsidies through the end of this year. But the tax credits would not be renewed under some budget proposals being considered in the House. Without them, the Urban Institute has estimated enrollment in ACA policies would decline by more than 7 million and that 4 million of…

Among the many explanations for the baby boom are rising incomes in the post-war economy, modern appliances that made childrearing more manageable, and lots of women who were no longer working in the factories. But a new study makes a compelling case for another cause: FHA and VA mortgages that made borrowing money for a house much more affordable for young couples. These mortgages changed homeownership from a privilege to a viable option for working-class and middle-class couples who wanted to raise a family. Federally insured FHA and VHA loans reduced the upfront cost of buying a house. The mortgage programs drove the births of an additional 3 million babies between 1935 and 1957, researchers from the Federal Reserve Board…

With its fate hanging in the balance, it’s a good time to remember the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau arose out of subprime mortgage scams like these. A mother who moved her young children out of coveted government-subsidized housing after a loan broker told her she could afford a house. Foreclosure ensued immediately. A woman wanted to buy a house but she had poor credit. The broker addressed that by adding her unemployed daughter to the application and falsely claiming the pair owned a hair salon. The broker filled out a business license at city hall on their behalf. A young couple from Colombia were thrilled to be able to buy a home. They were unaware the broker had inflated t…

COVID and technological advances have created a perfect storm of fraud against older Americans. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of fraud cases reported to the Federal Trade Commission more than doubled to 2.6 million. But the losses from these scams tripled to $10 billion, indicating the scammers are becoming more effective. “Today’s scams are more coordinated, more sophisticated and more personalized,” Ray Bellucci, executive vice president of TIAA said in a new report on fraud focused on the impact on Americans over 60. Older people have long been more susceptible to fraud due to high rates of social isolation, heightened during COVID. This is especially true if they are divorced, single, or widowed and don’t have someone to talk…

In a recent podcast, syndicated columnist Helen Dennis and I discuss her program for “renewment” as opposed to retirement. Specifically aimed at career women in or moving towards retirement, Dennis and her program co-founder Bernice Bratter have convened more than 40 groups of women working together to find fulfillment in their post-working lives. These groups of eight to ten women meet regularly, sometimes for decades, to discuss the issues they face in their later years. While each group is autonomous, they are guided by Dennis and Bratter’s book, “Project Renewment: The First Retirement Model for Career Women.” It provides prompts for discussion such as: The New Retirement Dennis explained to me that a lot about retirement has changed in recent decades. This is t…

To qualify for federal disability benefits, individuals must demonstrate that a medical condition prevents them from working. But some disability beneficiaries do work and those who earn more than Social Security allows are not entitled to a monthly benefit. These working beneficiaries may run the risk, often unwittingly, of being overpaid.   The overpayments must be paid back, which can cause hardship for a group of individuals who are already struggling financially. According to researchers at Mathematica, the risk is high that working beneficiaries receive payments they aren’t entitled to. While only 4 percent of the people in this study have earnings above the monthly limit, the Social Security Administration overpaid 82 percent of them during the decade the researchers…