The Importance of Retirement Age for Social Security and Medicare

The retirement age is a contentious issue in the debate over how to shore up the shaky finances of Social Security and Medicare. Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley recently called for raising the retirement age for Americans in their 20s as a way to reform Social Security, saying it should match their life expectancy. Social Security's trustees said last year that the program's combined retirement and disability trust funds will be depleted in 2035, at which time Social Security will only take in enough income to pay 80% of scheduled benefits. Meanwhile, Medicare's trustees said last year that its hospital insurance trust fund, known as Part A, would drain its assets by 2028.