The Baby Boomers and the not so Affordable Care Act

Why is it that we needed the Affordable Care Act? Was it because everybody was told inaccurately that Americans were dying in the streets untreated? If you ask Europeans and people from other continents that is exactly the perception they have about the United States. They do not know that any American can walk sick into an emergency room and he/she will be treated immediately. They don’t have to wait weeks and months to have a doctor’s appointment, tests, and procedures before they are actually treated as is the case in all socialized medicine countries.

Why was it that Obamacare had to have a 15-member “death panel” that rations care based on age and utility to society, a complicated formula that only a bureaucrat can devise, not a doctor who took a Hippocratic Oath to care for all sick, regardless of age?

Will a person past the age of 55 be able to receive expensive treatments such as chemotherapy for cancer? We do know that anyone over the age of 70 becomes a “unit,” they are no longer human beings.

Between 1946 and 1964, there were 76 million Americans born, the so-called Baby Boomers. Four million had died by April 1, 2000. However, the U.S. Census counted 79.6 million due to “net immigration, the number of people coming into the United States from other countries, minus those moving the other way, outweighing the number of deaths.” http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/JustHowManyBabyBoomersAreThere.aspx

In 2011, the oldest Baby Boomers turned 65 years old, eligible for Medicare and Social Security. According to the Pew Research Center, for the next 19 years, 10,000 Baby Boomers will turn 65 every day. By 2030, all members of the Baby Boom generation would have reached 65. http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/baby-boomers-retire/

Every year approximately 3.65 million Baby Boomers receive an average $1,500 in earned Social Security benefits for a total of $5,475,000,000. The first wave started receiving their payments in 2011. In 2012, 3.65 more million Baby Boomers became eligible for the same benefits. In 2013, 3.65 more million Baby Boomers became eligible for $1,500 in Social Security, bringing the total outlay in three years to $16,525,000,000. Each year until 2030, $5,475,000,000 will be needed additionally to meet just the Social Security outlays for Baby Boomers.

Given the excellent state of medical care in this country at the moment, the nutrition, and the level of exercise, it is reasonable to assume that Baby Boomers will live 20 years past the age of 65 if their health care is not rationed.

Meanwhile, the employed labor force as reported in September 2013 was 144 million, shrunken by 11 million. Numbers did not specify how many of those employed were part-time and many discouraged workers were not reported or underreported, having dropped through the cracks of bureaucracy.  http://www.dlt.ri.gov/lmi/laus/us/usadj.htm

Part-time employment has been on the rise, prompting some economists to call U.S. “a part-time employment nation.” We do know that labor force participation has been stuck at 63.2 percent for at least two months. This labor force participation rate is the “share of the population 16 years and older working or seeking work.”  http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

If you divide the Social Security outlays for Baby Boomers each year for twenty years by the number of workers, the number is astronomical. It is mathematically impossible for the current labor force to support that many Baby Boomer retirees and other Social Security recipients and still have money for everything else in government.

Money paid to current Social Security recipients comes from the current number of workers and their employers paying an equal share of Social Security taxes. Self-employed pay both halves.

The ever-shrinking labor market will make it more difficult to meet the commitments made to the Baby Boomer generation and to other recipients. Once 11-12 million illegal aliens are amnestied, more individuals will be potentially added to the recipient rolls, particular SSI and disabled.

Is this not painfully obvious why politicians were eager to give us government socialized medicine, $719 billion cuts to Medicare over ten years to fund this socialized medicine, rationing of medical care, and a 15-member bureaucratic “death panel” to accomplish the rationing?