Editorial
Doomed from Birth: The Ida May Fuller Story Joseph C. Paviglianiti, M.D.
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t seems like everybody is retiring these days, especially physicians. Just in the Fox Chapel/Monroeville area alone, well over 10 pediatricians have retired, or moved onto something “non-clinical,” in the short time since COVID started 2 years ago. That’s a lot of pediatricians calling it quits in a small area. The same thing is happening to physicians all over western Pennsylvania. Lots of factors are at play, but the overwhelming reason seems to be that physicians are just tired of banging their heads against a wall. The daily grind, and all that’s entailed with it, has squashed out much of the joy of taking care of others. In that foreboding spirit, just 6 months ago I sat down and calculated how many days until my Full Retirement Age (FRA), which is 67 (for those of us born after 1960). I created a “Dad’s Retirement Countdown” sign (June 30, 2032 !!) and thumbtacked it to the wall over my messy desk at home. This caused quite a bit of unexpected curiosity and angst amongst my kids, whom I think never before contemplated that dad would slowly fade away as they stepped up to their individual financial responsibilities, or that such a time was in the distant, yet foreseeable future, God willing. Truth be told, I hadn’t realized, or at least not really internalized, that my FRA had 12
been pushed back to 67 until I started writing this editorial… my original retirement sign was for June 30th, 2030 (age 65). I’m sure I have read it before, but 67 really just sunk in as I wrote this article. Now I gotta redo the sign and work for 2 more years. Crap! All this recent retiring of my colleagues got me to thinking about Social Security. Sure, we have all heard the doom and gloom that Social Security is going broke. But is it really? What does that mean to me and those younger than me? America’s first Social Security program was actually the Civil War Pension Program, though these were only paid to Union soldiers, later with survivor benefits. This opened the door for 95-year-old retired Union soldiers to marry 18-year-old brides, so the latter could have survivor benefits and the former could die happy. In fact, the last Civil War bride was receiving a Civil War pension until 1999! But, other than Union Civil War veterans, the general American populace had no such retirement plan. Corporate and/or government pensions didn’t exist. A lifetime of work resulted in a pocket-watch at best. The depression of the 1930s brought the problem of increasing numbers of elderly poor to the
forefront. A variety of pension programs had been proposed since the industrial age started in the mid-1800s, most of which involved some sort of taxation of the rich, but none of them really got anywhere because they were perceived as “welfare” programs, which left a bad taste in most Americans’ mouths. America was a “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” country and “welfare” was for lazy people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt came along and changed the conversation from “retirement welfare” to “social insurance.” This was a new concept where people actually “contributed” to their future retirement pension through mandatory paycheck deductions (i.e., FICA). In June 1934, the Committee on Economic Security (CES) was created to dream up a plan and by January 1935 the Social Security Act
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