Health Care

Common sense would suggest that Boomers will play a major role in the expansion of health care services over the next 30-40 years.  Such services will include the traditional combination of public and private sector health care providers, clinics, pharmacies, and hospitals.

In addition, you can add greater demand for plastic surgery of all types: make these bigger or smaller, build this up or trim this down, tighten this up, raise this, lower this—the list goes on and on

Boomers will not go willingly into our senior years—we will fight it constantly. Vanity of the Boomers? Off the charts!

Rising demand for health care services by Boomers, our parents, our children and grandchildren, and indigents will strain the system as never before. It is not at all a stretch of the imagination to suggest that health care spending will carve out a larger share of GDP over the next few decades.

Such a move towards greater health care spending was already under way.  However, the move will clearly be aggravated by an aging Boomer population. While this shift will be “good news” in regard to U.S. job creation, it will be “bad news” in terms of trimming overall productivity and optimizing utilization of resources.

Answer this question quickly. What is your largest monthly payment obligation?

Most respondents would logically say a mortgage payment. However, for many, the answer is, or soon will be, their monthly premium for health care.

As we know all too well, monthly premiums have been rising faster than incomes for many years. As health care costs continue their unrelenting march higher, we are slowly, but surely, moving unavoidably in the direction of a government-sponsored, nationalized health care system. I find the thought truly scary.