Anecdotally, my grandmother who worked as a state nurse for about 15 years (which is less than I've worked now that I'm in my mid 30's) received a golden pension higher than the average salary in the US along with 100% free health insurance. In the last few years of her life she used probably a million dollars in health services - new hips, massive amounts of brand medication, ear specialists, eye specialists, and finally the last few weeks of life sustaining care in the hospital.

She did not die in poverty. In fact, for the last 30 years of her non-working life, she enjoyed better medical care and a standard of living far better than any of her grandkids who were paying for her.

You can go a lot deeper on this. Even today, about 50% of seniors would be below the poverty level without Social Security.

That's mostly okay, because the majority of seniors have the major expenses covered by guaranteed benefit pensions, Medicare and private savings, usually in the form of a house.

But things would get pretty grim without the government programs.

As far as private savings, those disappear almost immediately in the face of a medical disaster.

Things are pretty grim indeed without the government programs (Social Security and Medicare).

Bankruptcy by medical disaster should be averted by Medicare and a supplementary plan, assuming it's late enough in life. Slightly earlier, and yeah, your savings can vanish.

It's one thing to give welfare to older people who can't work to keep them off the streets and quite another to give them welfare so they can give lavish inheritances to their children.

http://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/policy-basics-t...

I'm hoping there is some kind of reckoning whereby these poverty-destined seniors can be inevitably moved to dense housing and care facilities for cost-effectiveness...well, not counting the immense medical bills they'll probably try to rack up on their way out the door. Want that new hip at 74? Sure, just pay for it all out of your pocket.

Might sound cruel, but strangling the youth to feed the elderly, as would be the alternative, doesn't work in the US economic model.

It sounds very cruel. There's most certainly a balance we can strike but when politics, particularly in the US, is so two sided balance is hard to find. Picking up the elderly and forcing them to move is pretty drastic. Imagine being 10-20 years from death and having to leave your home, family, friends and community. When your partner dies you're going to be pretty damn lonely and I doubt you'll survive long - or want to survive long.

>> "not counting the immense medical bills they'll probably try to rack up on their way out the door. Want that new hip at 74? Sure, just pay for it all out of your pocket."

There's absolutely no reason we can't afford to provide free health care to everyone. Health care should not be something you get if you can afford it. I doubt you'll be espousing this same view when you can't walk due to a bad hip and can't afford a new one possibly due to factors outside of your control. If we can afford endless, unnecessary wars, and the bailing out of large financial institutions we can afford to help everyone to lead bearable lives with adequate medical care and decent financial benefits where necessary. Sure there will be people who abuse those systems but from what I've read it's negligible.

Sigh, this is unfortunately a subject I refuse to go into much detail about, but this view was entirely crafted under the auspices of having an expensive, lifetime handicap. Pre-ACA, I lived constantly under threat of medical bankruptcy and pre-existing condition rules that were written to benefit big companies at the expense of my health. I had to make a lot of compromises, and still do, and I have very little sympathy for those who have lived a long and productive life and will do anything to stay alive, I just don't feel that way personally.

I know I take more out of the health care system than I put in. At least I can admit that. What we're dealing with in the case of the elderly is straight up denial that they could have any responsibility for their station in life now, and I'm not buying it.

Here are numbers to consider. Per capita real GDP in 2015 in the US was $51,143. Fourty years ago it was $24,693. We have more than doubled our per-person wealth, and are continuing to increase at 2%, roughly twice the rate of inflation.

We are absolutely wealthy as a country. Beyond measure. At some point, it should be reasonable to say some things about how advanced your society should be now. In the past, there have been many points where people and leaders together agreed we were advanced and prosperous enough to invest in our own country. Just in the US, some examples would be:

* Public education. Spending money to make sure no matter your means you have access to a generalized curriculum of schooling. * Transportation infrastructure. Be it rail, canals, trollies, roads - even the old dirt roads dug out for carriages, airports, subways, bike paths, or sidewalks. * Clean water. * Sewage * Electricity * Twisted pair * Coaxial * Fiber? * Welfare that tries to insure people do not starve, or sleep in the streets. * Prisons to remove from society those who cannot participate (and for some reason people who like smoking plants). * Guaranteed access to healthcare. Oh wait, only first world countries do that.

All of these are expenses, that we pay for in taxes and rationalize as being worth the cost, because our economy can bear the cost. And it has done more than weather these costs, it has exploded even with them upon it, and often because of these expenses - these investments - we are more productive as a result.

Peace of mind in retirement may not be as obviously beneficial to the econonmy as having an interstate highway system, but the benefits now should be apparent in how we can easily see that when children are not burdened to care for their ailing parents they prosper.

So the question is not if the young are suffering for the rich, because social security has existed for going on five generations since the 40s and has had provable economic benefit in the intervening years. It is important to distinguish the benefits of the expense (social security) from the means to pay for it.

This of course ties back into growing wealth inequality, but it is important to separate why it is good to do something and why you might be getting the money to do it the wrong way.

Well now that you mention it... if we have responsibility to the poor of this country, do we not also have responsibility to the poor of other countries? Even more so if you are talking about the US due to all our meddling in the affairs of other countries.

However, unless these nations concede sovereignty to the US, we cannot be held responsible for the bad behavior of nation states and be expected to make up for their failings with our own sacrifice.

If everyone wanted to voluntarily join a world government that also provided UBI to every human being I would absolutely be for it, in the knowledge that I would certainly lose a lot of first world conveniences to uplift the extreme poor in third world nations. We could get away with spending a lot less on entertainment and excess and more on guaranteeing human decency to everyone.

But when you start talking about using force of arms to force my own ideals on others and compel them to participate, that is well over a line. It would require the mutual desire and cooperation of everyone to try it.

EDIT: Really, I can't tell.

Your personal experiences of the elderly in rest homes are probably not a representative sample of the elderly in society, for all the usual reasons that personal experiences aren't representative, plus the fact that elderly in rest homes themselves are likely not representative of elderly in society.

/s

It's easy enough to say that it's up to oneself to 'take responsibility', until you find yourself in a place where there are no jobs, and it's really not possible to thrive.