Surprise! Where Did Those 65 Years Just Vanish?

For weeks media breathlessly reported that Yikes! the first of the huge, 78 million strong Baby Boom generation, born 1946 to 1964, are about to turn 65 and start collecting Medicare.

Now folks, this is a pig that's been passing through the python for six decades yet we seem to be astonished at every turn. In the 50s we didn't have enough trained teachers nor classrooms -- remember all those temporary trailers snuggled into the parking lots?

In the 60s public colleges couldn't handle the overload. In the 70s the housing and job markets became stretched and in the 80s roads spilled over with Yuppie cars plastered with those self-absorbed "baby on board" stickers.

Within a few years, media will breathlessly report the stock market is stalled because, Surprise! boomer retirees are drawing down their 401(k) pension plans as mandated at 70½. There'll be a another Surprise! come 2025 when media breathlessly report on the shortage of caskets and rapidly dwindling graveyard acreage.

I'm not sure what this says about our attention span and prescience as a nation but it sure can't be good. Is there any way we can retroactively indict everyone who ever sat in congress since 1950 for shortsightedness and cowardice? Okay, I'll even give you since 1965 when Medicare passed.

Well, the road down which that can has been incessantly kicked has come to an abrupt end. And at precisely the wrong moment.

We'll be working out of this economic collapse for several more years. We've stretched our debt limit about as far as we dare. Partisans on the right have congealed around slashing taxes. Insolvent corporate and government pension plans threatened seniors' security. And millions more retirees living longer than ever will be stressing the Medicare and Social Security coffers.

So where's the fix to come from?

Most proposals to save Medicare -- Social Security is in a little better shape -- coalesce around means testing and increasing premiums and altering eligibility age, benefits and copays when those 50 or younger turn 65. But some, like conservative economist Robert Samuelson, insist Boomers, retired or soon to retire, must take a hit on current Medicare entitlements in order to spread the pain across generational lines.

That argument goes that for 45 years Boomers have been disproportionately rewarded by federal tax dollars at the expense of younger generations, so, in a paraphrase from one of the Boomers' favorite shows, "sock it to 'em!"

Given current political acrimony and the seriousness of the issue -- nothing less than setting seniors back to a time prior to Medicare and Social Security when a majority of them lived out their final days in poverty -- this is not going to be a pretty debate.