Here are stories of some Americans for whom Social Security provides crucial support.

A medical emergency sent Lee Bliven and his wife, Susan, into bankruptcy and his unexpected retirement at 62.

His first thought upon getting Social Security: “I’m safe now.”

Lee had been paying Social Security taxes since he was a young U.S. Forest Service firefighter tackling wildfires from Canada to Mexico. After he married, his father-in-law suggested he work for a water-well drilling company. Eventually, he started his own one-man business.

Susan earned master’s degrees in family therapy and special education, and they raised two children in a home they owned.

Back then, Social Security was “just another tax coming out of my paycheck, making my paycheck smaller,” Lee says. “I always thought it was for old people.”

In 2001, when Susan was hospitalized with appendicitis, doctors discovered multiple benign tumors in her abdomen. Operations over the next 16 years to extract more tumors included four surgeries to remove one wrapped around her spinal cord. That left her partially paralyzed and with vascular dementia.

There were further complications from diabetes, fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis. The Blivens thought they had good health insurance, but their medical bills grew to an astronomical $2 million.

“We were putting money away, and I thought we were going to have a nice retirement,” Lee says.

They lost their house and savings. He says the stress of trying to manage Susan’s care, his job and bankruptcy gave him a heart attack at 60. Later that year, he shuttered his business.

In 2013, Lee began receiving Social Security, and eventually they moved to Eugene, where their children live. Their combined income covers rent, utilities and groceries. And, Lee says, it allows him to care for Susan in their wheelchair-friendly two-bedroom apartment, about 100 miles south of Portland.

Lee hasn’t forgotten what it was like to choose between paying for prescriptions and paying for rent, or the ordeals Susan experienced in rehab—including a stay where she was left sitting in her own waste after a bout of food poisoning—so he dedicates himself to helping others in similar crises.

When his volunteer work takes him to area senior centers, he finds the discussion turns to Social Security. The parents and grandparents of today’s beneficiaries never had to deal with cuts to their Social Security checks.

Now “it’s just downright scary,” he says. “If they change Social Security and start making it harder for people [who] are not rich, we’re going to lose a lot of people.”

In 2000, Dale Marshall was working in Colorado, testing software and checking health care records to ensure that patient data hadn’t been lost as the new millennium dawned.

Then she received a call: Her 61-year-old mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Her mom needed help. The older woman was also a caregiver for her younger sister, 57, who had suffered brain damage in childhood.

Marshall closed her fledgling consulting firm and returned home to Maryland. She became a legal guardian for her mother and aunt. She found her mother’s finances in disarray, declared bankruptcy for her mom and devoted her life to full-time caregiving.

Marshall’s healthy 401(k), her mother’s government pension and her aunt’s disability income allowed them to live together in Marshall’s townhouse near Fort Meade. But 14 years of caregiving depleted her savings.

At 56, after her mother and aunt had died, she tried to get another information technology job. Despite her experience, including as a contractor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and on the Hubble Space Telescope, recruiters said her skills were out of date.

“They wanted more certification,” says Marshall, who couldn’t afford the $23,000 for additional training. Instead, she found work as a receptionist at a construction contracting company. “I took a big pay cut,” says Marshall, who had made six figures when she worked in IT. She worked until 65, then sold her townhouse and built a house on her family’s land to be near her cousins, about 30 miles south of Washington, D.C. After her mortgage, construction loans, insurance, utilities and prescriptions, Marshall says, she’s usually left with $240 for groceries and gas but sometimes has surprise expenses.

Last month, her doctor changed her diabetes medicine. The cost increased by $70, and after paying for all her medications, she had $95 remaining.

At 66, Marshall is looking for part-time work. At job fairs she sees plenty of people her age, creating a lot of competition in her rural county. “It’s a shame that we are in our 70s, in our late 60s … and we’ve got to go back to work to try to make ends meet.”

She worries that she’s fully dependent on her Social Security checks. “At my age, I’d hoped to have two or three [sources of] income,” she says. “So it’s kind of sad and depressing sometimes. It really is. But I’ve got to keep moving. It’s not like I have a choice.”

She wants to work as a home health aide. “That is my passion, caregiving,” Marshall says. She’s had a few interviews, and friends are keeping an eye out for possible jobs for her. In the meantime, she devotes her time to her community, volunteering at her church and for AARP, talking to groups about her experiences as a caregiver and trying to help others going through the same thing.

If she ever needs caregiving herself, she has two godchildren who will help. But she worries that without Social Security she would lose her independence and her house.

“It’s my biggest fear that I’m not going to have any money left and I’m going to live in a shelter,” Marshall says. “I don’t mean a homeless shelter. I mean a lean-to!”

Robbie Dickson was a chef at a boutique hotel in Mobile, Alabama, when COVID-19 caused the hospitality business to collapse.

“All of a sudden, my world got turned upside down,” says Dickson, who had planned to work until 70. “Thank goodness my Social Security was there.”

He applied as soon as he was laid off. He lived on his savings until he received his first check. That monthly $1,135 covers Medicare Part B, rent and utilities. To pay for groceries and other expenses, he works a few hours a week as a maître d’ at a seafood restaurant.

Now, instead of hopping 150 miles over to New Orleans to visit friends, entertaining a couple of nights a week and shopping at specialty food stores, he looks for buy-one-get-one-free deals, conserves gas by consolidating errands in one trip and relies on free events like the Gulf Coast Shrimp Festival. Recently, he and a fellow retired chef pooled beef scraps to make their own hamburger meat.

Last year he found his financial situation precarious as he healed from a hernia operation. Without his part-time job, he had to rely on a food bank and talk to his landlord and utility companies about paying late.

“It was hard to let people see me like that,” he says. “It takes very little time to fall behind.” While he still has some savings, without Social Security he doesn’t know if he would be able to support himself. Chefs are on their feet all day, and while his doctors say he’s healthy for his age, he worries about his body and potential cuts or elimination of the program.

He has lived in his apartment for 43 years and doesn’t want to move to subsidized housing. “I’d have to start selling all my belongings,” he says. “I don’t know where I would go. Hopefully, I’ll never get to that point.

“For a lot of people, this is all they depend on, and they’ve paid into it. I mean, it’s their money,” Dickson says. “Those people that are trying to cut the Social Security … they’ve never walked in our shoes before.”

In 2011, Suzanne and Susan Leedy needed to rethink their lives.

In 2006, at age 58, Susan had stopped working as a nurse because of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis and had started getting Social Security disability benefits. Suzanne, a real estate agent, had retired in 2007 at 62, when she could collect her Social Security retirement payments.

Most of their savings went to medications. One drug alone cost $1,700 a month.

So in 2011 they sold their house in Alexandria, Virginia, across the river from Washington, D.C., and found a less expensive community in the Shenandoah Valley about 100 miles southwest, where their combined income of $4,800 a month, plus money from Suzanne’s part-time job renting time-share units, would give them a comfortable life.

Then, in December 2020, as Susan was recovering from knee replacement surgery, she had a stroke. A dementia diagnosis soon followed. To keep her wife at home, Suzanne needed to become a full-time caregiver.

“Fortunately, our house is paid for. We couldn’t do it if that weren’t the case,” Suzanne says. Though the two, married for more than 10 years and together for 35, depend entirely on Social Security, Suzanne isn’t worried that income will disappear.

The Social Security trust funds are projected to run out of money by 2035 if Congress doesn’t fix the problem. The Social Security Board of Trustees estimated last year that the program will be able to pay 83 percent of scheduled benefits unless something is done.

But the trust fund shortfall is easy to solve, Suzanne says.

One place to start, she says, is not putting a cap on earnings subject to Social Security payroll taxes. Doing that would raise “plenty of money,” she says, and solve a big part of the program’s funding problems.

In 2025, earnings up to $176,100 are subject to Social Security tax. By contrast, people pay Medicare tax on all their earnings.

Suzanne, who calls herself an optimist, believes lawmakers will keep Social Security going at 100 percent.

“We’ ve been through trouble before and made it out the other side,” she says, remembering the 1983 law that stabilized the program’s finances for several decades. “I feel certain we’re going to all come together at some point.”

Carolyn Antell’s interior design business couldn’t survive the 2008–09 Great Recession, and at 62 she didn’t have time to wait for a rebound.

“There were a lot of tears, and there was a lot of realization that ‘Honey, you’re going to have to live on your Social Security,’ ” says Antell, who estimates she furnished about 700 weekend and vacation homes in New Hampshire and Colorado over her 40-year career.

She’d weathered previous economic downturns in her 30s and 40s, divorced two husbands and raised three children. By claiming Social Security at 62 instead of waiting until her full retirement age of 67, her benefit was permanently reduced by 30 percent.

In the beginning, Antell augmented her then-$800 monthly check by applying for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and holding down several part-time jobs, like walking dogs, watering lawns and working at a Lane Bryant store.

As a second career, she went back to school, earned nursing assistant credentials and became a care provider for older adults. Now fully retired, she spent four years on a waiting list before she could move into subsidized housing.

The rent and utilities for her 560-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment west of Denver are set at 30 percent of her income. The building is drafty in winter and can reach 90 degrees in summer, but Antell says she’s grateful to have a home she can afford.

Her fixed rent and Social Security allow her to pay for a mobile phone, cat food and repairs to her 2009 Subaru.

“A lot of people don’t even understand how Social Security began or works. Every paycheck you’ve ever made since you started working is … taxed for it,” Antell says.

In the past four months, she’s been bombarded with stories about Social Security Administration staff cuts at field offices, with some phone services being taken away, then rolled back. “We hear they’re going to cut back, but we don’t know how much,” she says. “I can’t take the level of fear.”

She wants her state’s representatives to know how crucial Social Security is to people like her who can’t work enough to afford rent. Antell estimates she makes 20 calls a day to lawmakers and decision-makers, urging action. “I’m at war,” she says. “This is a battle, and it is exhausting.”