Demographic aging is increasing pressure on pensions, disability payments, and nursing care benefits.

By TPS

Israel’s wartime fiscal burden is colliding with an aging population and a fast-growing welfare bill, as officials warn that the country’s social security system could exhaust its reserves by 2035 under its current financing model.

The National Insurance Institute, Israel’s main provider of old-age pensions, disability benefits, child allowances, unemployment payments, long-term care support and other social payments, is facing a worsening actuarial crisis that could force the government to raise contributions, tighten eligibility, cut benefits or cover the shortfall directly from the state budget.

The warning was discussed Monday at a joint Knesset hearing of the State Control Committee, chaired by MK Alon Schuster, and the Labor and Welfare Committee, chaired by MK Michal Waldiger.

Officials from the State Comptroller’s Office told lawmakers that an actuarial assessment published in December 2025 moved the fund’s projected depletion date forward to 2035, earlier than previous forecasts.

They also warned that from 2029, the institute’s current revenues and bond redemptions will no longer be sufficient to cover benefit payments required by law.

The crisis comes as Israel is already facing elevated defense spending, reconstruction costs, support for evacuated communities and long-term care for wounded soldiers and civilians following the war.

At the same time, demographic aging is increasing pressure on pensions, disability payments, and nursing care benefits.

Dr. Hodiya Lampert, deputy director of the Social and Welfare Audit Division at the State Comptroller’s Office, said the deterioration was driven in part by the 2018 long-term care reform, which sharply expanded spending on nursing-care benefits.

According to figures presented at the hearing, annual spending on long-term care benefits has risen to 21 billion shekels, compared with 7 billion shekels before the reform.

“About 30% of elderly Israelis are currently eligible for benefits under the Long-Term Care Insurance Law, and Israel has the second-highest level of spending in this field, after Lithuania,” Lampert said.

She recommended reexamining the assessment method, noting that Israel is the only OECD country that evaluates dependency based on documents alone, without a face-to-face meeting.

Riki Maman, a research fellow at the Kohelet Policy Forum, told TPS-IL that the crisis reflects a basic mismatch between the institute’s legal obligations and its revenue.

“The National Insurance Institute is obligated to pay benefits according to the law—child allowances, old-age pensions, disability benefits, and others,” Maman said.

“It has the total amount it pays every year, and the total amount it receives every year. In recent years, its expenses have risen significantly.”

Maman said the institute had for years collected more than it paid out, placing the surplus in a reserve fund that generated returns. But that model has now reversed.

“Today, its expenses are greater than its income. It is like going into overdraft,” she said. “If there is no change in income or spending, the savings will eventually run out.”

She said the 2018 long-term care reform was a major driver of the deterioration because it expanded eligibility and made it easier to receive benefits without an in-home functional assessment.

“Eligibility expanded from about 17% to about 30% of elderly Israelis,” Maman said.

“That is very high compared with the OECD and other developed countries. It is probably not because there are more functional difficulties in Israel but because there was a change that made it easier to receive the benefit.”

Maman said benefit expansions often change incentives and bring in far more applicants than policymakers expect.

“They did not correctly estimate the growth in eligibility,” she said.

She added that if the fund is depleted, policymakers will be left with few options.

“When the fund is exhausted, it means there is no way to pay benefits to people,” Maman said.

“Either payments are raised through taxes, benefits are cut, or National Insurance contributions are increased. There are not many options here. Either you take more money from citizens, or you give them less.”

Zvika Cohen, acting director-general of the National Insurance Institute, said years of legislation had expanded benefits without identifying funding sources.

“At the end of the day, the National Insurance Institute is the implementing contractor of the legislature,” Cohen said.

“There is a lot of populist legislation, and there must be a budgetary numerator. Whoever proposes a legislative amendment must provide a funding source.”

For Israel, the funding crisis is becoming an early test of whether a wartime economy can sustain broad welfare commitments while expanding defense spending and caring for a rapidly aging population.

Without a structural fix, the burden will fall either on taxpayers, vulnerable citizens, or the state budget itself.

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Despite war, economic strain, and months of national uncertainty, 442 new families joined Israel’s foster care system over the past year, offering vulnerable children a safe and loving home.

According to Israel’s Welfare Ministry, more than 3,500 children are currently in foster care, alongside hundreds of disabled children and adults who rely on the system for daily support and stability. Officials described the surge in foster families as a powerful sign of Israeli resilience and mutual responsibility during one of the country’s most difficult periods.

The government has expanded financial assistance and training programs for foster parents while advancing legislation aimed at removing age restrictions for families seeking to foster children.

Welfare officials praised the families stepping forward during wartime, calling them a lifeline for children desperately in need of warmth, security, and belonging.

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If community health care centers were forced to close unless they were reimbursed for providing services to illegal aliens, how many of their patients actually are illegals?

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

In the flurry of lawfare aimed at blocking anything and everything that the Trump administration is doing, it’s easy to dismiss any single lawsuit as just more partisan legal obstructionism, but the lawsuit filed by 20 Democrat states against the Trump administration is a major admission.

The lawsuit filed to challenge the Trump administration’s ban on federal benefits going to illegal aliens is being billed as an effort to defend children.

But it’s actually an admission that much of the welfare system in Democrat states is actually used to provide services to illegal aliens.

The lawsuit makes a two-fold argument, that individual clinics and providers who offer various government-subsidized services, including health care and education, are incapable of determining who is an illegal alien, and that they service so many illegal aliens that they would go out of business if they were forced to stop.

The first argument, that distinguishing an illegal alien is a “complex determination that cannot be made by an untrained individual” is farcical obstructionism, but the second argument is deeply revealing and also deeply disturbing.

The lawsuit is led by New York, and the press release from Attorney General Letitia James claims that the new guidelines “barring many safety net programs from serving all residents, regardless of immigration status,” would cause the collapse of free health and education.

For example, her press release contends that “New York’s 850 community health centers provide primary and preventative care to 2.4 million low-income residents, regardless of insurance or immigration status… without federal funding or reimbursement for treating patients whose status cannot be verified, many centers could be forced to close.”

That claim is backed up by a declaration from State Health Commission James McDonald.

If community health care centers would be forced to close unless they’re reimbursed for providing services to illegal aliens, how many of their patients actually are illegals?

The conclusion would seem to be that either a majority or a significant percentage are illegal aliens.

And that taxpayers funding these centers are really funding free health care for illegals, providing a magnet to draw illegal aliens to the United States and then to keep them there.

New York and other states claim that defunding illegal aliens would wreck Head Start. While this is treated as an accusation, it’s actually an unintentional admission.

How much of Head Start funding is actually being expended for illegal aliens? And how many Americans are losing out?

An ACLU lawsuit focused on Head Start cited claims from California and Illinois that significant numbers of illegals benefit from these taxpayer-funded programs. That’s a call for urgent reform.

The Democrat states that filed the lawsuits repeatedly admit that they use taxpayer funding to provide services to illegal aliens and that they are suing for the right to go on doing so.

“All families, regardless of their citizenship, deserve access to a high-quality education, adequate healthcare, and community support,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell argued.

Over and over again, attorney generals in liberal states list how much money their states receive to provide educational and health care services, and complain that they will no longer be able to function if they are forced to cut off services to illegal aliens.

That suggests these health care and educational programs are really primarily servicing illegal aliens.

The lawsuit by 20 states inverts reality, claiming that cutting off funds to illegal aliens will hurt legal recipients of health and education programs, when it’s exactly the opposite.

Americans have been cut off from access to programs because they’ve been overrun by illegal aliens.

It’s not the Trump administration that is killing Head Start or community health clinics, it’s Dems who insist on opening up services meant for Americans to illegal aliens the way that their administrations opened the border to millions of illegal alien invaders who now fill their cities and states, overrun parks, crowd out schools and create massive social services deficits.

The lawsuits argue that the Trump administration is undermining the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act which they usually refer to by the hideous acronym PRWORA, but the whole reason that PRWORA existed was to thin out the welfare rolls, not only of illegals, but of new immigrants. Bill Clinton repeatedly resisted welfare reform, but finally gave in and signed PRWORA after vetoing two previous bills, because opposing welfare reform was unpopular.

Having signed the bill, Clinton quickly took credit for it, claiming, famously and falsely, that it ‘ended welfare as we know it’, but he also double-crossed Republicans by redefining a whole slew of federally funded social services programs as not being “federal public benefits” and therefore exempt. This mangling of reality stood until the Trump administration took it down.

Democrat attorney generals are now arguing that Clinton’s subversion of the stated intent of PRWORA is the bill’s true meaning and that it’s vital that illegal aliens continue being subsidized by taxpayers. So much for ‘ending welfare as we know it’. Welfare is now worse than ever.

In the 90s, Republicans complained about new immigrants going on welfare, now federal benefits are used to subsidize an illegal alien population tens of millions strong.

The final argument being trotted out by Democrats in sanctuary states is that unless we go on subsidizing services for illegal aliens, the results will be worse. Cut off illegal aliens from community clinics and they’ll go to ERs. S

top offering them free medical care and they’ll spread diseases. Stop giving them free educational programs and they’ll become violent criminals.

Open borders Dems want us to believe that illegal aliens are our future and that unless we coddle them, they’ll bankrupt us, rob us and make us sick. None of this is a recommendation.

The obvious solution is to stop coddling illegal aliens and to start deporting them.

And the lawsuit by 20 Democrat states promises us huge savings if we get rid of our illegal alien problem. 90% of Democrat states have admitted that illegal aliens form a sizable part of their social welfare complex. The more of them we deport, the more money we’ll save.

The admissions that 90% of Democrat states have a major illegal alien drain on their federally funded social welfare programs shows why sanctuary states and cities exist, and why it’s incumbent on the federal government to end the corrupt racket taking money from Americans to give to illegal aliens, abusing our charity and using it to bankrupt our country.

The more illegal aliens we deport, the more Americans we can help.

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