Issue Position: Promoting Retirement Security

Issue Position

As a physician, I see clearly how decisions made in Washington impact the lives of my patients and their families. That's why as president of the National Physicians Alliance, I worked alongside other national groups to fix a broken health care system that was failing older Americans.

As part of our work on the Affordable Care Act, we helped strengthen the viability of Medicare by closing the "donut hole" to make prescription drugs more affordable, introducing preventive services with no out-of-pocket charges, and reducing overall healthcare costs.

In Congress, I'm committed to strengthening Medicare and Social Security to protect these lifelines for retiring Americans.

Social Security is the most successful anti-poverty program that this country has ever seen. And in today's low-wage nation with few guaranteed job benefits, Social Security is more important to retirement security than ever.

I'm honored to have the endorsement of one of the leading advocacy groups for retirement security, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and I look forward to continuing our work together to make sure current and future generations receive the security in retirement they've earned.

Extending Solvency

For too long, the conversation about Social Security in Washington has focused on ways to cut benefits in order to extend the program's solvency. Instead, we need to focus on ways to strengthen Social Security without weakening this important lifeline for aging Americans.

One way this can be done is by increasing the current cap on annual earnings ($117,000 as of 2014) that is subject to the Social Security tax. In the last few years, the share of earnings has declined from 90% to 83.5% because the vast amount of increased wealth has been concentrated at the very top of earners. If the share of earnings that fund Social Security had remained constant at 90%, the annual cap would be about $216,900 today.

Closing Loopholes

We also need to look into closing the loophole that currently allows employers to intentionally misclassify their employees as independent contractors in their tax filings, thereby circumventing the crucial payroll tax revenue that funds Social Security. The Treasury estimates that misidentification of employees result in a loss of $2,666 towards Social Security per income earner of $43,007. Closing these loopholes would return lost funding in the Social Security Trust Fund.

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