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 liberal 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.

“Somebody on the Republican side is going to have to tell our base, `You can’t grow your way out of this problem. We’re not going to turn Social Security into one giant 401K plan.’ Somebody is going to have to go to the Democrats and say, ‘New ideas have to be part of the solutions’.” Graham said. “And, somebody is going to have to go to every American and say that we’re going to have adjust age [limit], based on reality.”

Graham said Congress should consider finding a way to index “age to reality,” when it comes to retirement. That would ensure that “politicians are not in this bind every 20 years,” he said. Another panelist, former Oklahoma Senator Don Nickles complimented Carper and Graham for being willing to take on Social Security, while noting neither serves on the committee that oversee the program. “We need people on the Finance and Ways and Means” to take up this cause, said Nickles, who served on the Budget and Finance committees as a senator.

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.

Graham said reforming Social Security could be a “gateway” into tackling Medicare. “The political alliances that you form to fix Social Security will be the political alliances you would form to fix Medicare,” he said.