Comment by EdiX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EdiX | Hacker News Reader

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> The government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old.

This more likely than you think, likely enough, in fact, that it has already been confirmed to have happened in multiple countries [1]. The problem of fraud and data corruption is widespread enough that it is hampering longevity research [2][3]

    [1] https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-blue-zone-distraction
    [2] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000148
    [3] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3

No, it's not likely at all.

Yes, beneficiary fraud is likely--if you said that hundreds of people were drawing Social Security for people who are deceased, I would believe you. But the reason we know this occurs is because we periodically audit the databases to find cases where deaths were unreported.

A claim of 150 years old would be older than the oldest verified age for the past 30 years. Saying that the SSA merely failed to notice the claimant's death is thus tantamount to saying that the SSA has never audited its database for unreported deaths in at least the past 30 years, despite welfare fraud being a salient political issue at multiple times in that timeframe.

But in none of those cases, the claimants are registered as 150 years old. E.g., you might as well argue that since tax evasion is a thing, social security fraud probably is too. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.

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