Entitled to Know

Do you have $215,000 socked away for your retirement healthcare costs? Most don’t. But that’s what Fidelity’s annual healthcare survey shows retirees will need to cover their medical bills. And not surprising…that number is 7.5% higher than last year. That’s significantly higher than inflation and expected to continue growing at the same unsustainable clip, year after year.

This is America’s true economic crisis…not “entitlement” spending. Between the uncontrolled deficit spending over the past six years and the debt that comes with it, tax cuts for the wealthy and these skyrocketing healthcare costs it’s easy to see where our true challenges lie.

Fidelity projects that a 65-year-old worker who now earns $60,000 a year and expects to retire at the end of this year should expect that 50 percent of his or her pretax Social Security benefit will be eaten up by health expenses in the next 16 to 18 years. But rather than proposing real healthcare reforms to reign in the unchecked cost of healthcare, this administration is arguing we can’t afford the aging baby-boom generation and we must cut benefits…they call it “entitlement reform”. Social Security and Medicare did not create our current budget and healthcare crisis and cutting these programs just as the nation’s baby-boomers retire won’t solve them.