Retirement Income Security : A Look at Social Security, Employment-Based Retirement Plans, and Health Savings Accounts

This paper presents issues examined and discussed by participants at the Employee Benefit Research Institute's spring policy forum in Washington, DC, held May 5, 2005. EBRI President Dallas Salisbury said the forum was designed to pull together research that touched on the "total integration of all aspects of financial security." About 100 participants examined the different forces at work that threaten economic security in retirement, and heard EBRI researchers and others discuss three topics: Social Security overhaul, 401(k) enrollment and accumulations, and health savings accounts. Before the forum ended, participants appeared to agree on the need to include health care expenses as part of retirement planning, and on the idea of automatically enrolling all workers who are eligible to participate in 401(k) plans. But they expressed widely divergent views in a debate on the president's proposal to restructure Social Security