[Texas Fossil]

and we baby boomers demand all the cool new stuff that modern medicine invents: anti-cholesterol drugs, hip replacements

I am a boomer, born in 1947. But that statement is total rubbish. My wife "required" a hip replacement at age 59. She either had a hip replacement or be in a wheel chair the rest of her life. It was paid for largely by private insurance and out of our pocket. She is now enrolled in Medicare.

Now, the article is correct about Medicare being a total ponzie scheme. It was always a tax, not what they sold it as. Yes, the "evil" boomers have been paying into this scheme their entire career, involuntarialy. And now as they approach the age when the benefits were "promised" it is clear that the money is not there to finance it. And the solution presented by government is to simply tax more? Yes, Insanity indeed.

[palmer]

Hip replacement is expensive and there’s little amibiguity, when your wife needed it there was and is no alternative. However one has to be careful of what one wishes for. The drugs mentioned are going to get incredibly cheap and government is going to want to give them to everyone for everything. The dirty secret of government health care especially medicare is that the government will choose to put everyone on drugs. Already it is truly awful at a (primarily medicare-funded) nursing home that I am familiar with. They give out generic Oxycodone like candy. Worse than candy, they force it on patients to get them under “control”. It won’t surprise me if pain killers eventually become a replacement for hip replacement.

[kabar]

In January of this year, C. Eugene Steuerle and Stephanie Rennane of the Urban Institute published an update to their earlier work "Social Security and Medicare Taxes and Benefits over a Lifetime." The chart below illustrates their findings and shows the huge discrepancy between lifetime Medicare taxes paid and Medicare benefits received.

This graph shows that the average man and woman (average defined in the study as average income over their working lives and living to the average life expectancy) who start receiving benefits in 2010 get over 3 times more in benefits than they pay in to the system! Of importance, the study accounts for inflation by calculating all past taxes and future payments in 2010 dollars to provide an accurate comparison.

If the notion that Medicare recipients are simply "getting back what they paid in" is false then where is the money coming from? Simply, the excess received is being borrowed from younger generations and the cost is more than we can bear.

We are constantly reminded of the government's inability to manage a budget under the arbitrary debt ceiling (raised 80 times since 1940) and that the national "on budget" debt is over $14T. The debt conversation all too often omits the "off budget" debt that includes underfunded liabilities to Social Security and Medicare which is about $110T according to a Forbes article; totaling more than $900K per working American.