[Tijeras_Slim]

Cheerful Sunday Morning Ping ya' young whippersnapper you! :)

[proxy_user]

Well, as the article notes, there are too many boomers for this to have much effect.

[Tax-chick]

If the Boomers have higher-than-expected mortality in their early retirement years, how will that impact Social Security and Medicare solvency projections?

[dakine]

"Our roads, our cars, our buildings, everything is pretty much designed for twenty-somethings...."

Uh-oh...

[Wage Slave]

I work in assisted living. Not all of the residents are old folks. More than a few are lefty burnouts in their fifties and sixties who fried their brains with drugs. They talk to me and tell me their life stories. Every one of them has been a lifelong lefty. Most of them are debilitated by mental illness or Parkinsonian Syndrome.

[KyHammer]

Reap what you sow thread.

[The_Reader_David]

This reminds me of the wag who suggested he hoped to be shot by a jealous husband at the age of 98.

Maybe the boomers won't be a burden on Social Security and Medicare after all.

[Maynerd]

All of those problems contribute to more deaths from drugs, suicides and accidents than seen in previous aging generations.

Social Darwinism working its magic and improving the gene pool.

[Smokin' Joe]

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration says deaths among motorcycle riders over age 40 have more than tripled in a decade, from 541 in 1994 to 1,847 in 2004, often from boomers climbing on high-powered machines either for the first time in decades, or even the first time ever.

Yep. That and the cell phone operator in a SUV (you can't call that 'driving').

The lesson to the kids out there: NEVER get rid of your motorcycle. Keep those skills honed into your old age!

[Obie Wan]

The boomers who are dying prematurely are doing the Social Security system a favor.After all somebody has to make room for all the illegals who'll be on the system in the future !!!

[Jagman]

I cringe to admit I'm part of this cohort. We truly are a bunch of assholes.

[GoldCountryRedneck]

Well shucks!

Kinda looks like Joycelyn "teach masturbation" Elders, Klintoons' former Surgeon General, was right.

"We're all gonna die of somethin'...."

[DustyMoment]

Wowsers, what a revelation!!!! The older people get, the more of them die!!!

This, obviously, is a condition that is unique to baby boomers!!!





(What a freakin' maroon!!)

[Hildy]

What a load of crap this article is.

[DakotaGator]

Another whiny boomer article. I'm a boomer and I hate seeing these self-centered pieces. We should tag them AWBAs!

Just because someone comes up with statistics doesn't mean anything needs to be done about it. So here are a few facts of life for Scripps Howard and we boomers:

1. If you live you will die.
2. When you die it will be because of something.
3. Neither medical nor social science has a cure for "something".
4. As you live you will age.
5. As you age things will change.
6. No science has a way to stop aging.

Those facts of life lead me to these observations;

a. How you live is a personal choice.
b. These choices affect how you will likely die.
c. Personal choices are no one else's business.
d. Medical science needs to get its nose out of people's personal choices.

So, for boomers; make your choices and take your chances.

For medical science; stop trying to influence personal choices and concentrate on caring/curing the sick/injured.

For all; embrace life for it is fleeting!

[To Hell With Poverty]

"According to the Scripps study, boomers accounted for about half of all people nationwide who died of drug-related causes in 2003. That is far out of proportion to their 26 percent share of the population."

Holy cow! And that's even with the meth epidemic that's sweeping today's kids, not to mention crack, ecstasy , oxy and all that. I had no idea.

I bet if this news was more widely reported a lot of today's teens and 20-somethings would be less likely to try drugs. I mean, who wants to emulate some washed-up old hippy?

[BlazingArizona]

A "glass half full" reading of the same statistics shows that my generation is dying from natural causes at a much lower rate than its predecessors. I first noticed this at my twentieth and thirtieth high school reunions: except for accidents and Vietnam, the class was virtually unscathed.

The extra deaths cited in this article are among the drug-intensive group. A lot of them ODed spectacularly in their youth, some in the middle of glamorous careers (remember Jim Morrison?), and they are still dying off at a high rate now. I have known a few people with early histories of recreational drug usage who dropped off in their early fifties. But once you factor out this special cohort, we see that the Boomer sense of adventure is leading to longer lives, not shorter.

[jocon307]

"In the mid-1990s, with the first boomer occupying the White House, the chronic diseases of aging - cancer, heart disease and the new scourge of human immunodeficiency virus - edged out violent death as leading contributors to the demise of boomers as the first wave emerged into their 40s."

Lend me an editor! What sloppy writing, surely the "first wave" of baby boomers were not "emerging into" (oy for that turn of phrase alone) their 40s in the mid-90s.

[Tamar1973]

All of those problems contribute to more deaths from drugs, suicides and accidents than seen in previous aging generations.

Of course there would be a greater # of deaths, there are a greater # of people in the pool to begin with. However, it's refreshing that someone in the MSM finally takes note of what many of us knew all along. Baby boomers haven't discovered a new way of "growing old gracefully." They just refuse to grow old which is like refusing to be born.

[mysterio]

In other news, the overall human death rate is holding steady at 100%.