Sourcebook
What is Social Insurance?
Life is filled with risks. Uncertainty is the rule because nobody can predict with confidence his or her future state of wealth or health. Families once bore the primary responsibility for caring for their individual members in bad times, but modern industrial society has scattered family members to different jobs in different locations. Certain risks we have agreed to confront as a society, rather than as individuals. Citizens have decided, through the political system, that we need financial protection against some of life's difficulties that are hard to face as individuals. These include old age, ill health, unemployment, disability that makes it impossible to work, injury on the job, and the death of a family breadwinner. For all these conditions, we rely on help from social insurance programs, which are financed by workers and employers.
Social insurance programs include Social Security, which pays benefits to retired and disabled workers and their families and to families of deceased workers; Medicare, which pays for health care for those over 65 and disabled adults under age 65; Workers' Compensation, which pays for wage replacement and medical care for those injured or killed on the job; and Unemployment Insurance, which provides partial wage replacement for those who have lost their jobs.