Opus 2016-236: Ode to Old: Time to Grow Up

It is time for old people to step up to the plate and take one for the team.  I speak as one who is officially old.  I am 68, soon to be 69 and not long after that 70.  In fact I will keep getting older until I die and then they will talk about how “he would have been 97, if he was still with us.”  Maybe it is time for us old folks to grow up and realize that TANSTAAFL.

I am looking primarily at Medicare.  The cost of this is destroying the country.  Okay, that may be a little over dramatic, but it is one of the problems with our economy and a set of concrete shoes for our future.  It is costing too much.  Why?  Many reasons.  A large one is mismanagement.  Waste sucks up the bucks.  So does fraud.  Another is government regulation which always lights the fuse on the rocket of prices.  The elephant in the room is the sense of entitlement that seniors seem to have. 

Yes, entitlement.  The same thing that is ruining the welfare system and education.  That character trait which we lay on the millennials when they want everything free.  They learned from their elders.  I saw it in my mother.  Before she hit Medicare she never had insurance and never went to the doctor.  After the government started paying she lived at the doctor’s office.  The thinking beings when you have good insurance.  I don’t know how many times my wife has said, “We have good insurance, I am going to use it.” 

We need to stop using it because we think it is our due.  Somewhere I read the suggestion that we should look at the car insurance model.  Car insurance does not pay for regular maintenance.  It covers damage from major accidents.   How would our rush to healing change if we actually were forced to ask ourselves, “Is it worth it?”

Perfect health will never happen.  No one will live forever.  We need to set an example of selflessness to the younger generations.  Will it hurt?  Of course but if nothing changes it will hurt even more.

homo unius libri