IIRC, the everincreasing costs of health care, new fee schedules for providers and an increasing covered population, are what's the overall threat to the funding viability of Social Security/Medicare system. In the U.S. everyone in a covered business, not all businesses or workers are part of the Social Security system, gets an automatic deduction from their salary equal to about 6.5% or their gross income. The worker's employer matches the amount with equal amount, and that's the amount given to the Social Security system in the employee's name. A certain portion of those payments are designated specifically to fund the Medicaid/Medicare systems. Workers exempt from the automatic deduction and maybe exempt from the system, any designated as an independent contractor and not salaried nor wage earning employee (exempt from automatic deduction but may have to make their payments independently from the automatic system), many types of governmental employees (state and municipality (including teachers in many areas)) are exempt from the system, railroad employees are exempt from the system, some others. Ever since the system's beginning there have been earning caps on the amount contributed; IOW, after the employee earns a particular amount the deduction is no longer made, and over the last twenty five years that amount has been raised to the six figure earning classification.
Sorry this message is so long and sort of boring.
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