The Full Scope Of Social Security Benefits

You work during your work life. You contribute. Your employer contributes. You retire. You draw the benefits. That is a key part of Social Security, but it is only a part. The rest of the protections in their own way are every bit as valuable and as necessary as retirement benefits.

For example, there is a disability benefit. If a young worker is on their way to work today and is disabled in an accident on a freeway and cannot work again, that worker under the social contract we have under Social Security has the ability not to become a pauper, not to have their family and children become paupers, but to be able to sustain themselves because they are part of this National, social contract in the insurance system where we have anticipated that that will happen to some number of people.

And we do not want those people's lives to be destroyed when a disabling accident happens, whether they are on their way to work, at work, or what have you.

In addition to that, we have, if we think of an even worse case, an instance where someone is a younger worker loses their life. We have a survivor's benefit so that again, you have a situation where the family is able to derive some support and some financial strength, but it comes off this National insurance contract that we have one with the other.

We hope this will not happen to us, but if it does or to the person next door or across town, then, we are tied into this arrangement where we provide this kind of insurance one to the other.

And it is a very important benefit. In every single day, there are younger workers in our society, workers up and down the scale to which these events happen, and families.

And the Social Security system kicks in. It is there when they need it. And thank God for it.

Finally, there is also health care protection in the Medicare Part A portion of Medicare. And so it is not just a matter of a retirement benefit per se in the sense of an income that comes in at retirement age, but it also is the very important and very valuable, very financially important support that comes through Part A of Medicare.

Any serious discussion of Social Security cannot be squeezed down to an artificially small definition of what it is, as important as that may be, namely, retirement benefits, but we have to understand this broader scope of the protections because that is really what ties the generations together.

This is really a cross-generational program. This is not just a matter of the younger workers providing a flow of income into the fund for retired workers, whether in their family or outside.

It is actually a cross-generational set of insurance protections so that younger workers have available to them at exactly the time they need it the most of a form of social insurance that they would not have any other way.

Sammy Beanard has researched and written about social security and other issues.

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