Look, even if the Baby Boomer cohort does retire and even if Social Security was funded properly, that leaves the stunning inflation of medical costs and significantly longer-than-forecasted life span of that population as yet one more entitlement economic choke-point that creates problems. There's also the closely held belief that "I paid into this system and I'm going to get everything I deserve!" which doesn't jibe with the decades of voting for people who mis-managed the finances. I don't forsee SS/entitlements "working out fine" barring drastic changes, such as collecting large swaths of destitute and poor Senior Citizens, busing them out to some reservation with centralized health care, and calling it a day.

The medical thing will resolve itself. The business model to handle it hasn't emerged yet. No manner of price jiggering is gonna add capacity to the medical system, so alternatives will be found.

Medicare will be a second-tier service. That's nearly inevitable. But nobody will do anything about this until they have to.

And frankly, longevity of Baby Boomers doesn't seem as likely to work out as it did for the WWII and Silent Generations.

I agree wholeheartedly about "mismanaged the finances" but this is the world we live in.

>The problem is the closely-held belief that There Must Be Suffering or we're not being responsible adults.

While this is quite true, there are underlying demographic factors to take into account. Namely, insofar as voting means anything at all, Generations X and Y together now outnumber the Baby Boomers among voting, working adults. This means that there is now an active, demographically-driven political conflict between the interest of incumbent creditors and the interest of an increasingly large majority of the voting, working adult public.