Squared Away Blog

With the nation still in the midst of an opioid crisis, a new study provides the first estimate of opioid use among people who apply for disability. One out of every four applicants used opioids in 2017 – below the peak in 2012 but still significantly more than in the general population, according to researchers at Mathematica and the U.S. Social Security Administration. And the researchers may be underestimating the extent of opioid use. Their data come from Social Security’s disability application forms. The forms ask applicants to list their prescriptions, including opioids taken for musculoskeletal pain such as a bad back, as well as their non-prescription drug use, and the stigma around use and abuse may encourage underreporting. To…

The pandemic will be on the marquee at this year’s annual meeting of retirement and disability researchers. COVID-19 has encroached on every aspect of older Americans’ lives, from their day-to-day work and home life to their retirement planning. Researchers will present studies on three impacts of the pandemic in presentations funded by the U.S. Social Security Administration. The event will be held over two days, Thursday and Friday, Aug. 5 and 6, from noon to 4 p.m. The event will be virtual again this year and anyone can sign up to attend for free. The first study on the agenda will explore the pandemic’s impact on older workers’ ability or willingness to work and on their retirement decisions. And for…

About half of the nation’s private-sector employees do not have a retirement savings plan at work, and that hasn’t changed in at least 40 years. Some states are trying to fix this coverage gap in the absence of substantial progress by the federal government in solving the problem.  And the state reforms are gaining momentum. In the past year alone, Maine, Virginia, and Colorado have passed bills requiring private employers without a retirement plan to automatically enroll their workers in IRAs, with workers allowed to opt out. New York City, which is more populous than most states, approved its program in May. And other states are either starting to implement programs or looking at their options. Auto-IRAs are already u…

Many older Americans could benefit from using home equity for some much-needed income in retirement. But they have found many reasons not to. Some want to preserve that housing wealth for their kids. Others don’t like the idea of cashing in on the equity if it means relocating to a smaller house or apartment or a less expensive neighborhood. They also have plenty of concerns about federally insured reverse mortgages, which are a way to extract equity but are complicated to understand. These doubts, expressed in readers’ comments on recent articles, are persistent. But economists see things differently: home equity has great potential to ease retirees’ financial problems – after all, roughly $8 trillion of wealth is locked up in…

Life’s unpleasant surprises – a new set of tires or a big vet bill – can get in the way of saving money for retirement. This is especially true for low-income workers. But if they are able to save a little here and there, the federal government provides a very big assist through its Saver’s Credit. Unfortunately, low-income workers are also the least likely to be aware the tax credit exists. Here’s how the Saver’s Credit works. The IRS returns half of the amount saved over the year – up to certain limits – by a head of household earning less than $29,626 or a couple earning less than $39,501. So, the head of household with earnings under the incom…

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June to reject another challenge to the Affordable Care Act was widely seen as the final word: the law is here to stay. But it was COVID-19 that underscored how important it is. The federal government said nearly 10 million people signed up for Medicaid health coverage during the pandemic year that ended in January 2021. A decade after passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which expanded Medicaid to include more low-income Americans by increasing the income limit for eligibility, the new sign-ups pushed total Medicaid enrollment to a record high of 80 million. The recent increase was largely due to the spike in sign-ups among the unemployed or workers who saw their…

The federal government runs numerous small-scale experiments across the country to explore ways to help people on Social Security disability ease back into work to reduce the benefits being paid. In a recent webinar, researchers discussed the extreme challenges of designing programs that are effective, given the inherent disadvantages – from the disabling condition itself and discrimination to having less education – that people with disabilities face in the job market. After close examination of several programs, the researchers found that the primary goals of most demonstration programs are very difficult to achieve: reducing disability benefits or increasing the earnings of people on disability who have sporadic or part-time work. But they also suggested that the programs would be deemed…

My 85-year-old mother had been up a few times during a night in early June and still wasn’t feeling well in the morning. I called her doctor, who sent a prescription to her pharmacy, and went about my day’s work. But when I checked in that afternoon, mom was in a full-blown medical crisis that she and her 92-year-old male companion did not think was bad enough to tell me about. I asked her companion to call the EMTs, who immediately dispatched mom to an emergency room a few miles from her Orlando retirement community. These events marked the start of my maiden voyage as my mother’s caregiver from 1,300 miles away in Boston. It was a high-stress affair that…

Most retirees manage to get by on less than they earned as workers. Yet they devote a much larger percentage of their income to medical care than working people. To limit their annual spending on care, retirees usually buy some type of insurance policy to help pay the bills Medicare does not cover. But a big shift is under way: the Medigap and employer plans that once dominated are now in decline. Only about a third of retirees have one of these two supplementary arrangements, down from two-thirds in 2002. Retirees are instead swarming into Medicare Advantage plans  – HMOs run by insurance companies – which doubled enrollment in the past decade to become the most popular form of coverag…

Women attend college at higher rates than men. Women’s labor force participation was also fairly steady prior to COVID, while men’s declined, and women continue to move into fields traditionally held by men. Despite all this progress, women still earn much less than men. Discrimination partly explains the pay gap, as does motherhood, which can interrupt the smooth progression in women’s careers at a critical time. But another explanation doesn’t get as much attention: women earn less because they’re not as confident as men about how much they can get and are more afraid of taking some risks in negotiations with employers. In the 2018 and 2019 graduating classes at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, women started their job…

We celebrate the stories of hard-working immigrants who achieve the American Dream. But their success in the real world largely depends on their residency status. Undocumented farm workers are the most precarious. Living in the shadows makes it difficult to break out of low-wage jobs and move into more lucrative work. The Dreamers who came here as children are also undocumented. Some have been granted temporary protected status by the federal government, but they’re not eligible for federal student aid, and companies are often reluctant to hire them, even though the law permits it. UCLA researcher Josefina Flores Morales uses U.S. Census data to investigate the connection between immigration status and socioeconomic status. She confirms what most people would expect…

The U.S. Social Security Administration reported a few years ago that half of retirees get at least half of their income from their monthly checks. For lower-income retirees, the benefits constitute almost all of their income. Yet Americans have only a vague understanding of how this crucial program works – one of many obstacles on the road to retirement. A new study by the University of Southern California’s Center for Economic and Social Research finds that workers are overly optimistic about their future benefits, which is one reason so many people don’t save enough for retirement. Workers “would probably have fewer regrets after retirement” if they were better informed, the study concluded. And many retirees in the study have regrets…