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| Go Nakamura—Getty Images |
As the U.S. approaches the fifth anniversary of the official start of the COVID-19 pandemic, new research finds so many Americans died from the virus that the nation’s Social Security trust fund will see a net increase of hundreds of billions of dollars as a result of retirement benefits that will not be paid out.
The working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that approximately 1.7 million excess deaths among Americans 25 and older occurred between 2020 and 2023 related to the pandemic. Premature deaths related to COVID mean Social Security will not make retirement payments to those individuals in the future, reducing payments by about $294 billion, the researchers found.
At the same time, some of that gain is offset by the lost tax revenue from those individuals, as well as increased survivor benefits to spouses and children of the deceased, resulting in an estimated $205 billion less in future outlays.
Many of the people who died were seniors older than 65 who were already drawing retirement benefits or would soon, and had paid into the system for many years. While most of the excess deaths were white Americans, Black and Hispanic populations saw the highest excess deaths per capita, as did those with lower educational attainment.
Of course, while excess death is one measure of how COVID continues to impact Social Security, there are other ways that the study notes it does not account for—long COVID survivors, for example, are more likely to drop out of the workforce, which could lead to paying less into Social Security over time and possibly needing to tap the safety net’s disability benefits. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images |
The number of deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic was so large that it ended up impacting the nation’s Social Security fund — which had a net increase of $205 billion. That’s according to a study out this week from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The early days of the COVID pandemic were scary — and for good reason, said Hanke Heun-Johnson, a research scientist at USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.
“So we had a lot of excess deaths — there were 1.7 million excess deaths during the pandemic,” she said.
Heun-Johnson co-authored the study and said many of those deaths were in people older than 65 “and were drawing retirement benefits, or were going to withdraw retirement benefits, and they had already paid into the system.”
They paid in but stopped collecting when they died. All those uncollected funds added up. This isn’t the first time a public health crisis has left an economic mark on the social safety net, according to Gopi Shah Goda, director of the Retirement Security Project at the Brookings Institution. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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