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Show Prime Time Social Security "Drop-Outs" Make Costly Mistake by Cy Brickfield Seduced and abandoned that will be the plight of thousands of workers in non-profit hospitals and state and local governments if their superiors decide to drop out of the Social Security System. While most American workers are required by law to participate in Social Security, an estimated 12.7 million state and local government gov-ernment employees and 1.7 million mil-lion employees of non-profit orga-zations orga-zations have the option of participating. par-ticipating. At the present time, according to the Social Security Administration, more than 80 percent of them approximately 11.5 milliom remain in the system. sys-tem. However, because of the serious seri-ous financial problems they face and because of false allegations about the impending demise of Social Security, a number of state and local governments and nonprofit non-profit hospitals are talking about dropping out of the program. Approximately 500 non-profit hospitals and more than 300 state and local governments have given the Social Security Administration Administra-tion the required two-year notice that they intend to drop out of the system. Once they exercise that option at the end of the two-year two-year period, they cannot get back into the program. One would hope that such an irrevocable decision would be made carefully and only after considering all the possible implications impli-cations of the action. Unfortunately, Unfortu-nately, this has not always been the case. Many government officials and hospital administrators are being pressured by private insurance companies that promise protection protec-tion similar to that of Social Security Se-curity but at far less cost. This often has resulted in what Secretary Secre-tary of Health and Human Services Serv-ices Richard Schweiker calls "hasty and sometimes uninformed decisions" to leave the system. But while government and hospital hos-pital officials are being seduced, it is their employees who ultimately ulti-mately will be abandoned. Those officials who seek to substitute a "cheaper" annuity program for Social Security in order to save money are making a tragic and costly mistake. Social Security is far more than merely an annuity program. In addition to individual retirement benefits, it also provides disability and survivor coverage and through annual automatic cost-of-living beiiCfit increases significant sig-nificant protection against inflation. infla-tion. Even if such a benefit package pack-age were available outside the Social Security system and I seriously question that it is the cost would be far greater than the cost of Social Security coverage. Another key factor is portability. port-ability. Few, if any, company-sponsored company-sponsored pension or disability programs are portable. If an employee em-ployee leaves the agency or institution, insti-tution, he or she loses credits and coverage. That, of course, is not true for workers covered by Social So-cial Security. It would be tragic if these shortsighted officials were to arbitrarily arbi-trarily strip away their employees' income, disability and survivor protection without providing a comparable benefit package as an alternative. But it would also be, as Secretary Secre-tary Schweiker has said, "a disservice dis-service to the American public." At the very time that we should be working as a nation to strengthen and improve Social Security, these unilateral actions weaken it and are contributing to unnecessary concern and fear about the future of the system in the minds of young and old alike. For the sake of today's and tomorrow's retirees, we cannot allow this to continue. (Cyril F. "Cy" Brickfield is the executive director of the A merican Association of Retired Persons and National Retired Teachers Association in Washington, D.C.) |
