By Crystal Lindell

Three years ago, on Feb. 24, 2022, I woke up at 3 am to use the bathroom, and realized I had double-digit missed text messages and voice mails – all of them filled with words like “urgent” and “immediately.”

I called my brother and he gave me the news. Overnight, our dad, David Jeffery Lindell, had died.

He had been fighting a bad COVID infection for three weeks and was hospitalized multiple times. But then he was sent home, where he had a heart attack. Paramedics tried to save his life, but my dad died hours later at the local hospital, just before midnight. 

He was 67 years old, and because he had been battling chronic physical and mental health problems for decades, he had long been declared permanently disabled by the federal government.

So, like millions of Americans who died of COVID over the last few years, my dad was on Social Security.

Now, a new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research reveals a dark twist to the pandemic: So many people died of COVID between 2020 and 2023, that it increased the Social Security Trust Fund by $205 billion.  

Well, more specifically, the 1.7 million “excess deaths” during those years saved the fund about $294 billion. Many of those deaths were working people, which resulted in less future payroll tax contributions and more payments to surviving loved ones. Factoring that in resulted in a net increase in the fund of $205 billion. 

The most heartbreaking revelation from the report though is that $205 billion isn’t a lot of money when it comes to Social Security. According to a Marketplace article about the report, the $205 billion in savings “won’t change much in the long term; the government pays that amount in benefits every couple of months."

In other words, all those human lives lost, and it’s barely even a blip when it comes to the federal government’s finances. 

It’s easy to forget that economic reports like this are talking about real, human lives. And that those human lives touched many other lives around them. My dad’s death was like a meteor hitting our whole family, and three years later, we are only just now starting to find solid ground again. 

A lot of the framing and discourse about this new report makes it sound like the government should be happy about the financial savings. But, as a country, now would be a good time to remember that human life has value in and of itself.

My dad mattered and would still be alive today, if not for COVID. He lived at poverty levels on his monthly Social Security benefits. His death, and the deaths of millions of others who were either on social security or set to receive it, should never be framed as a “good thing” by bean counters simply because it saved our government a miniscule amount of money.  

And to be clear, it wasn’t just people currently on Social Security who “boosted” the fund. People like my long-time friend Bronson Peshlaki, who had diabetes and died of COVID in 2020 at just 44 years old, will never collect on the Social Security payments he made his entire working life. Yes, that means his death was a cost-benefit for the U.S. government, but it was also a detrimental loss to the world. 

It can feel easy to dismiss the lives of the disabled, the elderly, the mentally ill – especially as their deaths are framed as some sort of economic boost for the rest of us.

But as someone with a disability, my life has value in this world. My dad’s life also had value, and so did my friend Bronson’s life. Now, as the U.S. healthcare system faces the possibility of more severe cuts and harmful policies under the Trump administration, it’s even more urgent that we remember that.

Every time the government lets a deadly disease spread a little more or cuts back on Medicaid, real people, with souls, will die. Regardless of how much money those deaths might save us, the cost is too high.