You're changing the subject here, and did not address my point. Whether or not privatizing - or any of the other options - is a good idea is a different matter. At the end of the day, calling for football teams to be owned by states or individual large companies, like say Pepsi Pirates as opposed to Oakland Raiders, the Michigan Maulers as opposed to the Detroit Lions, is not tantamount to 'abolishing football'. That doesn't make it a good or bad idea, and you may object to privatizing social security but you do not bother to discuss the merits, merely throw reckless invective at the concept and use terms just as charged and much less accurate as the 'death panels' you raised Holy Hell about to do it while using ALL CAPS, so I'll match you... No serious reform or change can ever take place while we are FORCING anyone who runs for office to tread over eggshells lest they say something that might conceivably scare someone, and the very inevitably of that occurring with any single-source government entitlement is the strongest reason not to have them or ever expand them without the most dire of urgency and necessity.