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Oct 2008
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Adding Life to Years
What issues matter most to seniors in choosing a president?
As I type these words at the start of the fourth week of September, the presidential election is about 50 days away. By the time you read this, it will be a lot closer. I'm guessing you can't wait for it to be over, especially if you've been watching television.
Saturation advertising is the curse of living in a Battleground State. But if you've been looking for substantive information about where the major-party candidates stand on issues that matter most to seniors, I suspect you've been disappointed.
What are “senior issues”? Many in the media imagine them to start with Social Security and end with Medicare. And those are natural concerns for older Americans, who benefit the most from those programs. However - and this should come as no surprise - older Americans have more than self-interest in mind when they go to the polls.
A survey taken in March of this year by the AARP Bulletin asked people to rate the importance of various issues in deciding whom to vote for in the presidential election. Here, in order, are the 10 issues most often rated as “very important” by people 50 and older:
- Government competence - Social Security - Rising health costs - War in Iraq - Education - Terrorism - Lack of health care coverage - High prescription drug costs - National deficit - Increasing energy costs
I suspect that if the survey were taken today, the overall economy or the crisis in the credit markets would be very high on the list. But it's still interesting to look at this list and compare the level of concern younger voters showed over the same issues. With the exception of Social Security and prescription drugs, only a handful of percentage points separated the ratings by people 50 and older from those 18-49.
What do the remaining major-party candidates have to say about these issues? I don't have space here to go into every one. And it's hard to pinpoint a “government competence” plank in either John McCain's or Barack Obama's platforms. But it's not hard to describe where the two stand on the No. 2 issue from the AARP survey: Social Security. Specifically, how to keep the program solvent.
According to summaries put together by the Boston Globe, Obama favors raising the payroll tax on the wealthiest Americans by subjecting a portion of income over $250,000 to Social Security withholding. Presently the payroll tax is applied only to income up to $102,000. Obama doesn't rule out any other options for strengthening the Social Security system, except he's against raising the retirement age for benefits.
John McCain strongly supports President Bush's proposal of personal savings accounts (sometimes termed “privatization”), which he also supported in 2005. He calls for a bipartisan effort to address the solvency problem and says “Nothing's off the table when it comes to saving Social Security,” but he remains opposed to raising taxes.
For what it's worth, the official McCain campaign website summarizes the Republican senator's views on 20 issues. Social Security is not among them.
On the other hand, the Obama site features an extensive “Seniors and Social Security” section. Among other proposals to be found there, the Democrat promises to strengthen prohibitions on age discrimination, lower prescription drug costs by allowing the government to negotiate for lower drug prices for Medicare, institute the automatic enrollment of workers in workplace pension plans, expand Senior Corps and other volunteer programs, and eliminate all income taxes for seniors making less than $50,000.
Despite such efforts to win over the senior vote, recent polls show McCain with a lead among people 65 and older. Obama dominates those under 40, and the two are running more or less even among people in the middle.
One encouraging point of agreement between the two major-party candidates involves health care. In almost identical language, the McCain and Obama campaigns note that three-quarters of the nation's health-care bill goes for patients with one or more chronic conditions. What's needed, they both say, is a greater focus on preventive care and the management of chronic conditions.
Whether such sentiments will translate into public-health-policy changes remains to be seen. We've read such sensible statements in campaign literature before. We've yet to see them make it into a campaign commercial, let alone an inaugural address.
Lawrence J. Weiss, Ph.D. is director of the University of Nevada, Reno Sanford Center for Aging and an adjunct associate professor of medicine. He welcomes your comments on this column. Write to him at weisslj@unr.edu or c/o Sanford Center for Aging, Mail Stop 146, Reno, NV 89557-0146.