The age for qualifying for Social Security benefits may need to be raised to reflect longer American life spans, Sens. Thomas R. Carper D-Del., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said at a meeting yesterday on the federal budget. When Social Security was created in 1935, a 65-year-old could expect to live another 12.5 years. Today’s 65-year-olds often have another 17.5 years left, according to Social Security’s Web site. Some Americans will go on for years way beyond that projection, said Graham, whose predecessor, Strom Thurmond, died in 2003 at 100.

“Everybody’s living like a senator . . . forever,” Graham said at a meeting on the U.S. fiscal crisis, sponsored by the nonprofit policy groups, including the conservative Heritage Foundation, and [New America Foundation and the Progressive Policy Institute]. “That’s good news.”

The bad news is that Congress needs to take a hard look at Social Security and figure out how to accommodate an increasingly healthy crop of older Americans, without putting excess burdens on younger citizens, the senators and other panelist said. Carper and Graham each cited the work that then-President Ronald Reagan and then-Speaker Tip O’Neill did together in the 1980s to stave off a Social Security crisis as a model for further reform efforts. Democrats and Republicans will need to cooperate again to tackle Social Security, and they will need to make tough choices, the two senators said. Reagan and O’Neill “told their bases things that they didn’t want to hear,” Graham said, adding that that kind of candor will be needed again. ...

Tackling Social Security could be a “dress rehearsal” for the biggest fiscal crisis facing America — the spiraling expenses of Medicare and medical costs in general, said Maya MacGuineas, director, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “The real problem is health care,” she said. GAO Chief David Walker, who has been serving as a kind of evangelist on the grim U.S. financial outlook in coming decades, earlier this year told Congress that Medicare and Medicaid are more of a worry than Social Security. Citing CBO, Walker said Medicare and Medicaid spending will reach 6.3 percent of gross domestic product in 2016, up from 4.6 this year, while Social Security spending will rise to 4.7 percent of GDP from 4.2 percent. ...