2019 Discussion Archive

Merton C. Bernstein 

1923 - 2019

Merton Clay Bernstein, Walter D. Coles Professor of Law Emeritus, Washington University in St. Louis died at home in Brewster, MA on August 3, 2019.  

The National Academy of Social Insurance and AARP will soon be announcing the winners of the 2019 Social Security Policy Innovations Challenge: Ensuring Adequacy for Workers. Through this Challenge, we will identify 3-5 feasible policy proposals that specifically address the income adequacy needs of older workers, who must claim Social Security retirement benefits before their full retirement age due to ill health, an inability to continue to perform physically demanding jobs, or other factors. (This 2019 Challenge in some ways builds on past crowdsourcing efforts the Academy has led over the past decade. As discussed further below, the Academy’s Challenges have produced a range of feasible ideas and policy proposals for strengthening Social Security.)

“Universal basic income” (UBI) has only recently come into popular usage, but the idea of assuring a base level of income to all is not new. Social insurance programs have been performing a similar function for much of the last century. Social Security and Unemployment Insurance both provide a base level of income given one’s eligibility for receiving benefits. The latter part of the statement is, of course, a defining characteristic of traditional social insurance—eligibility is contingent on one’s paying in.

“The first wealth is health.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson offered this observation in The Conduct of Life published in 1860, and the statement remains centrally true to the human condition today. The simple sentence belies the range of factors that have an impact on the health of individuals and populations, including the social insurance and other public policies that affect the ability to maintain health insurance and to obtain access to necessary health care services on a consistent basis throughout the lifespan. Good health is essential to the ability of people to participate effectively in education, productive work, recreation, and civic and community life. The current political and economic environment presents several threats as well as opportunities for ensuring access to health care across the generations.

Among the many headlines in coverage of the government shutdown: “The government shutdown spotlights a bigger issue: 78% of U.S. workers live paycheck to paycheck.”

For the roughly 800,000 furloughed federal workers, the partial shutdown began on December 22, 2018. These federal workers missed their first biweekly paycheck on January 11, 2019. If the shutdown continues, they will miss a second paycheck on January 25 and possibly future paychecks until the shutdown ends. Until January 16, when legislation was enacted guaranteeing that federal workers would receive back-pay upon the government’s reopening, these workers also faced over three weeks of uncertainty as to whether they would ever be paid for the shutdown period.