I agree with you totally about that. My point was that your generation will have an even greater expense than the entitlements if you try to keep all of us boomers alive up to the very last moment and provide medical care for all of us.
If I get to the point of not really knowing who I am, sitting in a wheel chair all day and having someone change my diapers, I don't want you to bear the expense of keeping me alive. I want a painless death. I want society to come to terms with euthanasia for those who consent to it.
As I said in an earlier post, you will be confronted with one of these 3 choices when you have millions of baby boomers in their 80'and 90's:
1. Pay for expensive medical care to keep them alive and in less pain. This probably means higher taxes for the next generation.
2. Let them just lay there and suffer.
3. Do what we do for a pet that we love when it comes to the end of it's life and is in pain and doesn't have much longer to live.
You can pick one of these, or suggest a 4th possibility.
Philosophically, euthanasia, should not be on the table. We are going to be fighting this battle neck and neck every step of the way.
You are very right that costs are going to come to a head very quickly. Obamacare, if passed will condemn many folks to die on a waiting room table if for no other reason than that they are not the ‘preferred people’.
The real question comes down to the cost of the health care system. What I have been seeing happen more and more, is what we call ‘medical tourism’, where people travel to another country to get care there. Rather then the expense associated with the medical system, they get the care for a much cheaper cost.
Why can’t that model be done in the US? Mostly a combination of things.
One, most of the front line health care workers are overworked, over burdened, and frankly burnt out. There’s simply not enough of them to meet the demand.
So where do you get the people from? This is the real problem that the boomers are running into. There’s 50 million people in this nation that are missing today from the age of 40 and under. That shortage, isn’t even touched by immigration both illegal and legal, and that’s not even getting into the issues of productivity.
Short of mechanization, getting more robots into health care, and trying to string out the people resources that are there, I simply don’t see a way out of the gap.
Another would be to try to get some of the chronically unemployed folks working, but that would take major regulatory changes, which are a huge part of the entry barrier associated with the profession. Every doctor and nurse should be training at least one other doctor and nurse every year. But, for many reason they only train a fraction.
Anyways, just a few thoughts. I don’t have a good answer, but Obamacare is like taking an already difficult path and burning your bridges behind you. America could function much better than other societies with the advantages of enormous wealth and a relatively young population. This is why Obamacare seeks to negate these relatvely significant benefits in exchange for nothing more than a one way path into slavery.