Health Care — for the Healthy

Medicare for all will likewise become a 2020 rallying point. But aside from its multi-trillion-dollar costs, it would destroy the 55-year compact of Medicare and indeed the 85-year-old history of Social Security itself.

Namely, these programs were sold on a number of premises, but two especially. One: Younger and healthier Americans would subsidize the financial, career, and health challenges of an older generation that was no longer fully hale. Two (whether still valid or not): Americans from their preteen years “pay” into a system that keeps track of their chits, calibrated by both years and dollar amounts, to adjudicate their own eventual retirement benefits, the so-called grand bargain that one now pays for others so that still others to come will one day pay for him.

While the system is nearing insolvency, the tradition that Americans individually have already “paid” into their retirement benefits would be destroyed, once benefits were shared by millions who had not yet contributed much at all. The generational psychological bond would end, and the very logic of Social Security as a war between old and young would arise.

The elderly are not historically illiterate. They grasp that all universal “free” health-care scams eventually hinge on culling out the costly and bad investments, i.e., themselves. They know that “Medicare for all” translates into “Medicare for no one,” especially in an age of open borders. So they will not be paranoid to also assume that in an era of euthanasia and “managed” and “rationed” care, it makes more progressive social sense to “invest” in our youthful future than in “prolonging” already-spent lives — especially when we will be adding more ethnic and racial fuel to the generational inferno.

A society that approves of killing an infant shortly after it emerges from the birth canal might similarly have little compunction about pulling the plug on a 90-year-old who was deemed “unproductive” or suffering from “severe deformities” — albeit of course after a “conversation” with family and their “doctor.” To the Margaret Sanger mind, abortion and euthanasia are twins, and both are cost-effective means to free up dollars for more “moral” purposes.