Tuesday, January 22, 2013

"America's CEOs Want You to Work Until You're 70"

Of course, because the richest family in America--those fortunate folk luckily born as progeny of Sam Walton, founder of WalMart--need older workers as greeters in their stores, most of whom one surmises would rather relax at home in their slippers and have to work to pay prescriptions and an array of copays.

Lazy slacker, Grandma, get off your ass and get to work, they say!

But silk tie and custom suit crowd can't fathom that some trades involve great physical stress and thus older people have more difficulty or face impossibility of continuing as carpenters, welders, and masons--you know the people who built most ever'thing we have.

Golly gee whiz, these clowns make it hard to not hate them.

[....the Business Roundtable, the Washington lobbying powerhouse whose companies together employ 16 million workers, is suggesting raising the age at which people can get Medicare and full Social Security benefits to 70. (The change wouldn’t affect people who are 55 or older today.) The reasoning: Americans are living longer and the costs of Social Security and Medicare benefits are growing faster than the tax revenue that pays for them.

Raising the Medicare age to 70, from today’s 65, would keep the oldest workers, who generally have the greatest health costs, on private insurance for an additional five years. The shift would hit states that cover more low-income seniors through Medicaid, and it would raise premiums for younger people who buy health insurance through state exchanges, as more people with higher health costs enter the risk pool.

This would save Medicare money—a good thing for taxpayers. But it would effectively increase health costs for the country overall, including employers. “For many seniors, their costs will go up. For employers in the aggregate, their costs will go up,” says Juliette Cubanski, associate director for Medicare policy at the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s because Medicare pays doctors less for their services than private insurers do.]
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-18/americas-ceos-want-you-to-work-until-youre-70#r=hpf-s

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