Americans Want Stronger Safety Net For Older Adults

Social Security remains broadly popular, and as the U.S. population ages, more Americans think the government should do more to help families care for older adults, according to Cornell-led research investigating shifting attitudes about aging policy.

Between 1984 and 2022, support for increased spending on Social Security grew to nearly 58%, up more than 8 percentage points, according to the researchers' analysis of nationally representative surveys. The increase reflects a narrowing of the gap between Democrats and Republicans to a nearly negligible level, even as the electorate overall became more polarized, the researchers said.

Meanwhile, half of Americans now favor the government helping older adults to pay for everyday household tasks - such as grocery shopping, cleaning and laundry - up from roughly 38% since 2012, the analysis shows.

"There is strong support for Social Security, as well as the idea that the government should help provide or pay for care for older adults with care needs," said Adriana Reyes, assistant professor in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and in the Department of Sociology. "There's a pretty large consensus that we need to do more, and that's an interesting and important shift in thinking."

Reyes is the first author of "Attitudes Toward Government Supports for Older Adults in the U.S. (1984-2022)," published June 29 in the Journal of Aging & Social Policy. Her co-author is Sarah Patterson, research investigator at the Survey Research Center within the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.

Each day, roughly 10,000 U.S. adults turn 65, an age when many start to rely more on government support to meet basic needs. Nearly 90% of adults 65 and older receive Social Security, which is projected to reach insolvency within a decade, resulting in benefit cuts. More than half will need some form of caregiving assistance during their lifetime, but government support for caregiving is limited.

"The increasing number of older adults is putting pressure on the Social Security trust fund, but also on programs like Medicare and Medicaid," Reyes said. "We need to think about what we need to do to either strengthen these programs or create new ones to assist older adults."

To explore how attitudes toward these issues have evolved over time and assess their policy implications amid ongoing calls to reduce government spending, Reyes and Patterson tapped the General Social Survey (GSS), a long running, nationally representative survey. They focused on questions about government financial assistance for older adults related to Social Security, retirement and their standard of living; and eldercare assistance, including whether the government should help provide, or pay for, household tasks. The number of respondents ranged from roughly 2,300 to nearly 53,000 for questions asked since the 1980s about Social Security. The researchers' analysis controlled for factors including age, gender, race and party affiliation.

In addition to consistent and growing support for securing Social Security, results showed growing support for government care programs over the decade since the GSS began posing questions about them. While roughly half of Americans want help paying for older adults' household tasks, support for government provision of such services is weaker but growing, rising from 14% to 24%.

Consistent with prior research, the data showed older adults are less likely to support spending more on Social Security, but their support has increased over the past decade. They are also less likely to think the government should pay for care, evidence that older adults' self-interest isn't driving national attitudes. While support for Social Security is bipartisan, Democrats and independents are more likely than Republicans to back government payments for care.

Robust support for Social Security may reflect the sense that it is an earned, deserved benefit that all adults eventually will utilize, the authors said. In contrast, many people optimistically think they won't need care support, or that they'll be able to rely on their children to provide it.

While attitudes differ somewhat among specific groups, the researchers said, overall trends show growing support for improving an aging society's safety net. Those trends may conflict with new federal legislation that anticipates significant cuts over the next decade to Medicaid, the nation's largest payer of long-term care.

"The popularity of these programs suggests policymakers should seek to sustain them and introduce new programs to help offset the costs of care," the authors write. "As the population ages, concerns about how the government will afford these programs do not seem to be filtering down to any less support for older adults, and if anything, more support is found."

The research was supported by the National Institute on Aging and Cornell Center for Social Sciences.

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