It is costing the Medicare system about $500,000 to take care of my Father-in-Laws heart-hip-infection problems and they aren’t finished yet.
My friend Wally and I took that number as a starting point and did some extrapolative math.  Which is at best scary.  The executive summary is that every working person in America will have to pay $5000 per year for 20 years for the baby boomers end of life experience.  Read the details here.
And then please tell me why I’m wrong.There are about fifty million baby boomers and we assumed about half of them will get the kind of care mentioned above.  Why not?  Medicare is the prepaid buffet of the medical industry.  Once you are in the line take as much as you want there is no additional charge to you.  So multiply five hundred thousand times fifty million divided by two and the cost for baby boomer Medicare comes about to about 12 trillion dollars. Fortunately it will be spread over about 20 years so it will only be about five hundred billion dollars a year.
How do these bills get paid?  The baby boomers will be retired so the next generation, our children, will have to pay.
The question then becomes: Can the people working  afford to pay our medical bills?  The math will tell us.  There are about 300 million Americans. 25% are students and not working, 25% are retired and not working and another 20% are unemployed, housewives, disabled or not working for some other reason.  This means that about one hundred million working people are going to have to pay the baby boomers medical bill of $500 billion dollars per year.
Doing the long division, so you won’t have to, we calculated that each working person is going to have to pay about five thousand dollars per year for the next twenty years to pay for baby boomer Medicare.
But you say haven’t we been saving the money they take out of our paychecks to pay for this.  Well we have been pretending to save it.  But in reality we have loaned it to ourselves and spent it.  The Medicare savings account is about as real as home equity in a new home in Las Vegas.
The only two solutions I can come up with are rationing, the European solution, or making the baby boomers use their own wealth to pay their medical bills.  The first sounds statist and the second is political suicide.  This mornings WSJ has an editorial about rationing of health care in England.
Please tell me my numbers are wrong.