Reducing healthcare spending on the elderly serves several objectives for the progressives:
1) If 1/3 of Medicare expenses are really incurred by seniors in the last 6 months of their lives, it represents real costs savings to the government.
2) Rationing health care expenditures for seniors will lower their life expectancy, reducing not only Medicare expenses but also Social Security expenses as well as expenditures on other social programs benefiting the elderly.
3) Accelerating the death rate of the elderly also helps on the revenue side of government, particularly when high inheritance tax rates are reinstated in 2011. The wealth of the elderly can be taken and redistributed by the government through high inheritance taxes in the name of fairness.
4) Seniors are disproportionately conservative and Republican. Accelerating the demise of the elderly through health care rationing shifts the political balance in this country.
5) For those progressives who disdain the white race, the elderly are disproportionately white. Accelerating the death rate of the elderly hastens the day when whites move into the minority in the US population.
I didn’t want to put it quite that starkly, but you bravely did. There are more things being put in place here, than meets the eye.
After collecting taxes from people for decades (to convince them of “care” in their golden years) I find what they are doing absolutely diabolical.
Not that it will help, but I was so mad when I read this, I shot it over to Levin.
At the point at which health care becomes practially unattainable . . .
A major crime will place the elderly patient securely in the hands of the correctional system, where incarcerated people have much quicker access to health care than some irrelevant non-parasitic citizen.
where did you get that idea?
Terrific assessment of the ‘real’ dangers of government controlled healthcare - and it’s not just a threat to seniors - any group of people who can be identified as disproportionately affected by a particular medical condition can be targeted to be either helped or harmed by directed care.
It is terrifying to me that what you wrote seems not only a plausible, but likely, objective of the Obama Administration. To grab the money of the elderly, be rid of their political influence, and avoid the cost of their healthcare and SS benefits – now that has to be an irresistible goldmine to that gang of Chicago thugs.