The Boomers are Coming. We’d Better Think Hard About That.

This is one of those stories that really shouldn’t be news, but is:

Millions of baby boomers are about to enter a health care system for seniors that not only isn’t ready for them, but may even discourage them from getting quality care.

The reason it’s news is because for years we’ve all decided to ignore that we have a significant chunk of our population that is getting older in one ginormous block. That block is going to hit our biggest entitlement system like a train hitting a block wall and the results are not going to be pretty at all.

As the article points out, the current crop of doctors who can deal with geriatric medicine is a lot smaller than we need and our Medicare system simply isn’t built to handle the demand an aging population will put on it. Not only is it woefully inadequate to pay for the medical costs this generation will require but its payment structure is not helping bring new doctors to the field.

Now, the current crop of Democratic candidates will tell you that the answer is more government-funded, government-regulated, bureaucrat-controlled health care. In the real world, that couldn’t be a worse answer. The government-sponsored health care system we have now (in the form of Medicare and Medicaid) has been wobbling toward collapse for over a decade and will wobble a lot worse in the next ten years. Medicare isn’t a Weeble. It will fall down.

But if doing more of the same isn’t the answer, what is? Well, at the risk of driving away all my progressive readers in droves, the answer lies in the free market. The relationship between supply and demand is a power provider, not only when it comes to goods and services a consumer might want but also for filling the market with people to provide those services. If there is a demand for someone with a particular expertise, and nothing gets in the way, then someone will step up and fill the demand. That’s how we get more computer programmers when the computer field booms or why there are a plethora of really good role-playing games available for the discerning gaming geek these days (even though there are fewer big publishers cranking out new games and systems than there were ten years ago). The simple fact is that we are going to need a lot more doctors. We had better make sure that we get the heck out of the way so that the demand for those doctors can be met as quickly as possible, with the best qualified and most motivated people we can get.

Were the medical field more open to the natural ebb and flow of the free market, I wouldn’t be concerned that we’re likely to be short of oldster doctors in twenty years. Medical students would move into the fields that needed doctors because that’s where the money is moving. Unfortunately for us, the medical field is still being held in a very tight orbit by the immense Medicare and Medicaid systems and we don’t have the inclination to shrink either one. Our motivations are sterling. We don’t want anyone to suffer and, thus far, our elected officials have given us only the option of Big Government to assure that is so. But Big Government hasn’t delivered on that promise. People still suffer, despite our best motivations, and the demand that programs like Medicare will place on us in the very near future will guarantee that more people, people who aren’t even in those programs, are goign to suffer a lot more than they have to. The only ones who won’t suffer are those folks in Congress and the people making very good money on a system that should have been scrapped a long time ago.

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Category: Health Care Craziness, The Economy and Your Money