IMO, our congress-critters should fix the trigger levels.
I wonder how many of the never-beneficiaries are simply those that have chosen to live off the grid, out of the eye of Uncle Sam. They would be working for cash and never paying into SS.
As an aside, I knew a fellow who emigrated to the US, worked and paid into SS and had earned benefits. He lost his job when the plant closed. The good news was that he was old enough to collect SS. Unfortunately, he had falsified his age decades earlier when coming to the US. As a result, while he was chronologically old enough to collect SS, his records showed he was not. I often wonder if he ever resolved the age issue with the SSA and collected SS or had to find a way to bridge the gap. I imagine this would also have affected his Medicare eligibility.