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Congressman
Elijah E. Cummings |
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Congressman
Elijah E. Cummings |
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(2/5/05 Baltimore AFRO-American Newspaper)
Preserving the Security in Social Security
by Congressman Elijah E. Cummings
President Bush declared recently that Social Security as we know it today is "inherently unfair" to African Americans because Blacks have a shorter life expectancy than whites and, therefore, receive less as a group in retirement benefits for the taxes that we put into the Social Security system.
However, respected analysts like Professor Jeffrey Liebman of Harvard and Dr. Maya Rockeymoore of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation argue that the President's assertion is misleading – in part because it focuses only upon the retirement benefits paid by the system.
They argue persuasively that the value of the disability and survivors benefits that we receive under the current system – taken together with the retirement benefits that we collect – make Social Security an essential "family protection plan" for African American families.
I agree with their conclusion – but the equally compelling issue that the President's comment raises goes far beyond what we should do about Social Security.
African Americans are dying before our time. We must take far more effective action to address that appalling inequity.
The core threats that are killing Americans of color are well-known: the widespread denial of affordable health care and the systemic discrimination that pervades our health care system. These are the forces that make our premature deaths a harsh reality of American life.
When the Congressional Black Caucus met recently with the President, we challenged him to act more aggressively to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities by closing the gaps in our health care financing system. We asked him to support the targeting of more federal resources to better protect us from the diseases ravaging our communities: cancer, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, addiction and HIV/AIDS.
The percentage of African Americans who lack health insurance is nearly twice the percentage of Caucasians who are uninsured – and medical science supports our challenge to the disparities in the health care that we do receive.
In 2002, a blue-ribbon National Institute of Medicine panel criticized America's health care system for the extent to which race continues to influence the quality of our care. In Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, the Institute's research team concluded that Americans of color tend to receive lower-quality health care than do Caucasians – even when our incomes and health care coverage are the same.
For example, we are almost four times less likely (than Caucasians) to receive necessary coronary bypass surgery – and nearly two times less likely to receive treatment for prostate cancer. We are 1.5 times more likely to be denied managed-care authorization in an urban emergency room and 24 percent less likely to receive life-preserving medications for HIV and AIDS.
We can overcome these deadly statistics, but we will do so only by concrete, scientifically-based actions – not by slogans alone.
The most direct response to President Bush's privatization argument is that none of these threats to our lives would be reduced by privatizing Social Security.
The facts about the importance of Social Security to American families – and, especially, to African American families – are clear.
Social Security works. It is an effective and comprehensive family insurance program – protecting America's workers and our families.
Social Security retirement benefits are guaranteed; but the proven Social Security system offers our families far more than essential retirement income. It also provides survivor and disability benefits that are critically important for hundreds of thousands of African American families.
Although African Americans make up only 12 percent of the population, we account for 18 percent of those receiving Social Security disability payments. At least 23 percent of the children receiving Social Security survivor benefits are Black.
In The Social Security Privatization Crisis: Assessing the Impact on African American Families (available on the Internet at http://www.cbcfinc.org), Dr. Rockeymoore and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation remind all of us that approximately 68 percent of disabled African Americans are kept out of poverty by Social Security's disability benefits – and that African American children are almost four times more likely than white children to be lifted out of poverty by the current system's survivor benefits.
Advocates of private accounts repeatedly claim that disabled workers and Social Security survivors would be protected in a privatized system. Yet, they provide no details about the level of support that would be preserved – and they do not tell us how these essential benefits would be funded.
Neither do they tell us how we would pay the more than 1 trillion dollars that it would cost to fund the transition to private accounts. What does seem to be clear, however, is that the impact of that cost could be most harmful to the families who need Social Security the most.
There is no immediate Social Security crisis. We should be acting to strengthen the funding of the system in thoughtful and deliberate ways.
I am convinced, however, that gambling with our Social Security benefits is not a policy that this nation should undertake.
Rather than using the gap in life expectancy between African Americans and whites as an argument for Social Security privatization, President Bush and the Congress should be doing all that we can to eliminate the health care disparities that are killing Americans of color before our time.
A renewed, bipartisan commitment toward achieving that goal would provide more of the security that Americans have earned, deserve and need.
-The Honorable Elijah E. Cummings represents the 7th Congressional District of Maryland in the United States House of Representatives.
