Mark Souder: “There are other things compounding this as well, and correct me and add to this if you have additional information, and…”

“There are other things compounding this as well, and correct me and add to this if you have additional information, and that is that people are living longer than originally projected in Social Security. Furthermore, the longer you live, and Congressman Coburn, as a doctor, knows this, there are more things that go wrong that are very expensive. It is one thing to replace your heart once, multiple times, other organs, but we have incorporated other programs inside Social Security. And so those who just say we can handle this on a cash basis are a little naive. Other people say, well, if you just bump the age of retirement a couple more years, that would fix it. But look at this assumption they have. That assumes there is no change in the age that people are dying. If you bump the retirement age by 2 years but through health advances they die 4 years later, we are actually facing a bigger shortfall than we currently have. A lot of the things that are trying to be put out to explain away this problem are actually good arguments that it could be much worse than it actually is.”