Full Citation

Title: Old, Sick, Alone and Poor: A Welfare Analysis of Old-Age Social Insurance Programs

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2015

ISBN:

ISSN:

DOI:

NSFID:

PMCID:

PMID:

Abstract: All individuals face some risk of ending up old, sick, alone, and poor. Is there a role for social insurance for these risks, and if so what is a good program? A large literature has analyzed the costs and benefits of pay-as-you-go public pensions and found that the costs exceed the benefits. This paper, instead, considers means-tested social insurance programs for retirees such as Medicaid and food stamp programs. We find that the welfare gains from these programs are large. Moreover, the current scale of means-tested social insurance in the United States is too small in the following sense: If we condition on the current Social Security program, increasing the scale of means-tested social insurance by one third benefits both the poor and the affluent when a payroll tax is used to fund the increase.

Url: http://www.karenkopecky.net/MTSIpaperOnlineAppendix.pdf

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Braun, R. A.; Kopecky, Karen A.; Koreshkova, Tatyana

Publisher: Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Aging and Retirement, Poverty and Welfare

Countries: