The historic 2 percent decrease in annual U.S. deaths recorded in 2004 sounds like an amazing victory for modern medicine, and it is — officials credit declining death rates for heart disease, cancer and stroke. That’s great news for those living longer, of course. But consider what such a trend, if that’s what this turns out to be, might mean long term, especially as the boomers age — more elderly people needing long-term care and other health services, and more and higher costs to sustain Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Why is there so much talk about how to stave off disease and death, and so little about how society is going to handle the consequences?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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20 Comments
Rhonda – the answer to that one is easy. Congress and State Legislatures are not requiring personal accountability. When you have a system that will allow people with money to hide their assets so they can be on the welfare system then you can only expect to see an increase in the government costs for health care. This should be a concern for a lot of people because at some point there will not be enough money to cover the costs for those that are really poor. When we get in full swing of the baby boomers retiring there is going to be a crisis. Something needs to happen now.
We’ll figure out how to deal with this. All industrialized nations have burgeoning elderly populations, and declining young/old ratios.
We may have to really open up the immigration gates to recruit several tens of millions of able-bodied workers, whose largest supply is the Third World.
We may have to advance Social Security and Medicare eligibility not to 67, but to 70, and perhaps eventually 75. People will have to work longer if they are not disabled.
We may have to fundamentally restructure the pharmaceutical industry, perhaps nationalizing it. Taxpayers pay for the training of scientists, most of the basic research that underlies the development of modern medicines, many clinical-trial costs, and a rapidly growing share of the nation’s prescription drug costs. A five-medication regimen taken by an elderly person paid for “out of pocket” from his/her SS check is a TAXPAYER cost.
We may have to slow down the pace of high-tech medicine, or redirect it to encourage cost-effective improvements. We can practice better preventive medicine.
Employers could save a lot of money paying for employee health-club dues, or building more onsite exercise facilities, and requiring employees to exercise six hours a week, as a condition of employment. In some places, they could give exercise credit for people riding bikes to work.
There is no single magic bullet, but a combination of many small steps can, in their aggregate, dramatically reduce the growth rate in medical spending.
The old are too many while the young are too few. Is this not a direct result of the contraceptive/ abortion/ nuclear family rationale? The citizens of highly industrialized countries no longer believe in traditional families, and why would they, when children and child-rearing is thought of as an undesirable nuisance to the working yuppie youth that makes up these societies? Therefore, they now result to modern day slave labor dependent upon the thriving populations of third world countries. Look at Germany, France, our own country, third worlders are being “imported” by the tens of millions. If this population trend continues, these countries will be completely overrun. The white man shall go the way of the Native Americans. This is an inevitability that no one can deny.
The following to me was one of the more interesting points from the WE linked article:
“The number of deaths has not dropped this steeply since 1938, when there were about 69,000 fewer than in 1937. A drop in 1944 came close — about 48,000 fewer deaths than the previous year. Health officials could not immediately say why the number of deaths fell so sharply in either of those years.”
Any speculation as to why this rate change would have happened in the 1930s? Perhaps related to the full implementation of Social Security?
“January 1, 1937 Workers began to acquire credits toward old-age insurance benefits. Employers and employees became subject to a tax of one percent of wages on up to $3,000 a year. Lump-sum payments were first made payable to eligible workers, their survivors or their estates. The Federal unemployment tax payable by employers of 8 or more was increased to two percent of payroll.”
See the historical time-line here:
http://www.ssa.gov/history/1930.html
I recall my paternal grandparents saying how much Social Security meant to poor aging people.
The current trend of improvement this year is hard to figure out. I assume it is related to much better, and more aggressive, medical treatment. There have been good drugs developed also. Now, if we can figure out a way for more people to afford health care. Of course, this will mean that more people will live longer, which Rhonda seems to think is a problem. Rhonda, Clinton was right in ‘92 when he said “we don’t have a single person to waste.”
[/socialist ranting for the day]
Assuming there’s no nuclear warfare.
There’s the solution, bring in Mexicans to pay S.S., with the caveat they won’t be eligible to draw it!
CrusaderX brings up a good issue “nuclear family”.
There is not a doubt in my mind that we ultimately see a large percentage of families gathering three to four generations under one roof, as per the Old World convention. Better that, in many ways, than warehousing the aged and infirm. We can learn important lessons. Our children can learn important lessons, about people caring for each other.
Let me throw out a bone for readers to chew on, or spit back, if they want: we’ll see a lot more home-schooling. As extended families learn to cohabit, the idea of separating children from their elders to receive factory-school educations will be understood to be highly counterproductive. (Of course, I’m not taking any risk here in making my assertion of home-schooling’s growth, because home-schooling is already growing by leaps and bounds, but if we think of extended families living under single roofs, home-schooling is going to have even more compelling force, because homes will have more teachers than one mom ((or dad)) shouldering this responsibility.)
I assume that it had something to do with the discovery of penicillin in 1928 and a series of other sulfa drugs soon after that.
It might have something (very little) to do with the fact that influenza vaccines started to be regularly given in 1945.
They’ll work longer. Or they’ll work part-time after retirement.
It’s not a problem unless you visualize old-people lying in a nursing home hooked up to tubes.
That’s not the reality of the situation.
We have to come to some common sense regarding keeping people alive long after the quality of their life is gone. Many people who are living in nursing homes, totally dependant on someone to take care of them, would rather be dead. I know I would be. If I should live that long and want to die, it should be my choice to not take my meds or antibiotics if I get an infection. We have limited the number of births, so we also need to balance it on the other end by allowing people to die when it’s the most humane choice.
I have mixed feelings on raising retirement age. It makes sense because social security was never designed to pay people for 30 years. So, it makes sense to raise the retirement age as disability adjusted life years goes up. However, this seems to be the problem for my generation (Gen X). The boomers have no interest in giving up their top jobs (inc. tenured professors, top management, etc) so we are all stuck as without much advancement potential if boomers stay longer. Boomers also have no interest in giving up their social clout or life-style so don’t expect ss to go anywhere. Gen X’s tech bubble burst, but we have to figure out what to do with ourselves now.
I agree that the cold storage facilities called nursing homes are pretty sad, but I don’t know an easy answer for it. Patients can refuse meds, but there are outside pressures from pharma and nursing business to keep them hooked. Not to mention a new found religious conviction that it is wrong to not do everything no matter what.
I’ll join with Heartlander a bit in this.
We are looking at the aged wise among us as a problem. There are problems yes. But our society is TOO geared to telling folks that if they cannot work anymore they have outlived their usefulness.
In addition to NOT cutting Social Seurity or Medicare/Medicaid how about funding to help the oldest and wisest among us USE that wisdom?
My 88 year old great aunt volunteers at a school. She is paid nothing for this. She does it to help.
But what if we embraced that and our elderly instead of turning away from them?
Think MENTORISM at all levels here. Train these folks! Compensate them to share their wisdom! Get them involved in day care and helping the homeless. Prisoners are helped by pets and animals. How about a fatherly or Grandfatherly figure they never had.
I’m sure others can expand on this idea.
These folks are a resource people. They made this country. Lets not treat them as a liability.
JR:”But what if we embraced that and our elderly instead of turning away from them?
“Think MENTORISM at all levels here. Train these folks! Compensate them to share their wisdom! Get them involved in day care and helping the homeless. Prisoners are helped by pets and animals. How about a fatherly or Grandfatherly figure they never had.”
Such posts are why I am proud to call JR my friend. He is absolutely right! I hope we, as a society who care about all of us, can respond to his plea.
JR,
Great post, I agree totally. The elderly should be made to feel usefull and appreciated, they are not disposable.
V.L.R.B!!
Darwins Discipe
Coming from you that last means a lot to me.You give good voice to my call. Thank you.
I’m retired. I’m giving something away, KNOWLEDGE that took MANY YEARS to accrue.But my knowledge is imperfect. It was a product of the past. Some of this knowledge will be useful in the future. But NOT ALL OF IT. If a piece of it is useful, I’ll consider that a contribution.
I had a med school teacher who said, “Half of what we teach you is wrong. Unfortunately, we don’t know which half that is.” He was an Australian. An immigrant.
I teach math because it has a really long half-life. To me, this suggests it is a subject worth teaching. It requires kids to become fluent writers in a “foreign language”. It requires them to use both halves of their brains: artistic visualization on the right side, writing and logic on the left side.
If kids can learn math, which requires diligence, and trains study stamina to do well in, they know they can learn a lot of other things
One of the problems brought about by the fantastic advances in medical science is that we’ve found prevention or cures for all the easy ways to die. People who used to succumb to pneumonia, influenza or other infections are now living long enough to die from cancer, parkinsons’s and alzheimers, and other forms of dementia, disability and pain. We’ve prolonged life, but not always useful life, and at what cost to both our dignity and economy? Medicine has a ways yet to go.While most of us would like to live to be 100, and then get shot by a jealous husband, it seldom works that way. This is why we need to consider living wills, advance directives and durable medical power of attorney while we still have the ability to make such decisions.
I’m glad Oregon upheld their right to physician assisted suicide for the terminally ill. People need to have the choice not to suffer. Having been through cancer, I know if there was no hope I would want that option. I have no desire to suffer needlessly and I certainly wouldn’t want to put my family through that, either.As a culture, we need to realize that death is as much a part of life as being born, and lord knows there are worse things than dying.
ramen damoon. there are indeed worse things than death.
When I wa in medical training, and saw uncurable cancer patiients undergoing futile medical treatments, I thought about giving them this option: “We will offer you $50,000 tax free to leave the hospital and never come back. Go to the Bahamas. Give it the money to your children. Or run up a $100,000 Medicare bill, suffer and die.”
What’s better?