Us Health Care and Public Policy

The United States of Americas social security program is the largest government program of any country in the world. This extensive program faces a number of challenges and problems, more so then ever before in it 's history. This essay will briefly discuss the history of the social security program in the united states as well as give an in depth look at the major problems it faces in the future such as the retirement of the baby boom generation, lower birth rate and longer life expectancy. Major criticisms of the Program will be discussed such as components appearing to favour specific members of society mainly the wealthy while negatively effecting lower class citizens. Several potential solutions will be compared and contrasted which are the main views of how to fix the problems within the social security program with major political disagreements on which solution would yield the best results. The solutions I will discuss in depth are increasing pay roll taxes , reducing benefits ,the privatization of the social securities program as well as others. The 1929 stock market crash in the united states and the bank failures which followed resulted in the United States loosing significant amounts of money. As all americans were effected by this the elderly were most direly as they lacked the time to regain their wealth before having to retire due to a number of factors such their mental and physical health.(ssa.gov 2010) Before social security was in acted the poverty rate for the elderly in the United States was approximately 50 percent for people over 65 years of age. (ssa.gov 2010) To counter act this trend the current U.S president Franklin Roosevelt created the social security program also know as the old age, survivors and disability insurance. This new social program was made to address the long term problem of financial security for the elderly through a system where individuals made contributions from their earnings into a combined fund which at the

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