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> Throughout human history, the old have subsidised the young. In rich countries, however, that flow has recently started to reverse. Ronald Lee of the Universi

> Throughout human history, the old have subsidised the young. In rich countries, however, that flow has recently started to reverse. Ronald Lee of the University of California, Berkeley, and Andrew Mason at the University of Hawaii measured how much people earn at different ages in 23 countries, and how much they consume. Within families, intergenerational transfers still flow almost entirely from older to younger. However, in rich countries public spending favours pensions and health care for the old over education for the young. Speaking in broad strokes (i.e. I'm sure there are plenty of individual examples to the contrary) the baby boom generation is the most selfish generation in recent history, voting to cut taxes and benefits for government and societal services after they had gotten their full use out of them. http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/yes-summer-job-paid-tuition-back-in-rsquo81-but-then-we-got-cheap/ http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/yes-summer-job-paid... > What really made me feel ancient is that the 1981 UW student guide shows the Med school charged only $1,029 a year back then. Today: $28,040! > The reason a summer at KFC could pay for a year of UW med school in 1981 isn’t that we were so hardworking and industrious. It’s that taxpayers back then picked up 90 percent of the tab. We weren’t Horatio Algers. We were socialists. > Today, the public picks up only 30 percent of UW tuition, and dropping. Imagine what would happen if young people actually voted.

magicGLASSman 11y ago
Why not get to the root of the problem? An education should not cost that much. Much of the reason the cost has outpaced inflation is the subsidizing of the tuition price paid by the student instead of making the process of educating less costly by using technology. Imagine what would happen if a degree was about what you know, not just a credential.
- reirob 11y ago
  Education should not cost anything at all. Full stop. Free education for everybody should be considered the biggest achievement by human beings. If a society is not able to provide free education for the upcoming generations, then the basis of such a society should be questioned, rightfully so.
  - mafribe 11y ago
    Education should not cost anything at all. Bikeshedding! Education always costs a great deal. Teachers need to be paid, schools need buildings, universities needs labs, etc. The only question is how payments are organised: taxes, fees, some hybrid ... Whatever mechanism is chosen, somebody feels hard up and will seek to change it. Yet, it's always the old paying for the education of the young, just like it is always the young paying the oldies' pensions.
  - cturner 11y ago
    Is there a limit to your principle? Should people be able to live at university forever, with a living wage from the public purse? What if they were enrolled but didn't ever attend? Should the government even be involved in education? Were it not for government protection, what kind of disruption would we have seen to the education sector by now? Given that university-educated people earn more than other taxpayers, why is it unreasonable to expect that they should be responsible for covering the cost of their education? Consider the deferred payment system of the Australian model. The Swiss model is interesting as well. In Switzerland, each university has to take whoever wants to go. But there's no rules about the conditions that they give you when you get there. So if 200 people applied and they were only set up for 50 places, they could give aptitude tests to them all, and then put seats and books in the gym for the remaining 150 with instruction to submit one difficult major project for pass-fail assessment each per semester.
    - orf 11y ago
      > Should the government even be involved in education? Were it not for government protection, what kind of disruption would we have seen to the education sector by now? More for profit colleges?
    - ollifi 11y ago
      > Should people be able to live at university forever, with a living wage from the public purse? What if they were enrolled but didn't ever attend? One way to sort it is the finnish system where you have certain amount of months you can get paid for. Your courses are tracked and if you are enrolled but are not advancing fast enough you need to payback your benefits. If you advance to further studies you can get more months, but eventually you run out of them. There is only so many places available to study and you need to take test to get into most places. It's not without its problems and it certainly is not 'free'.
- npalli 11y ago
  > Much of the reason the cost has outpaced inflation is the subsidizing of the tuition price But is this really true? Student tuition debt would say otherwise. In any case, you should follow the money and see where all this cost increase has landed. Certainly isn't the professor/TA salaries. Most of the increase has flowed into administrative costs. An entire bureaucratic edifice has been constructed that contributes nothing to education. Same with healthcare. Guess what, most of the bureaucrats are Boomers!. One more reason to designate the Boomers as the worst generation.
  - merpnderp 11y ago
    This is what happens when incentives for efficiency are removed. In industries with large amounts of regulation we see this over and over. In education with more than 50% of money spent on administration it's just particularly obvious.
- cgearhart 11y ago
  > An education should not cost that much. This is true, but it is not the root cause of the problem - and it is a distraction from the issue because it places the blame on providers. In the past, there was no significant incentive for the cost of higher education to increase at the pace we've seen for the last 20-30 years. The big mistake was pushing for individual loans for each student to pay for college rather than subsidizing the system. This created distorted incentives where schools needed to spend money on "extra" things to attract students who had money to spend, rather than trying to push down the cost of providing quality education to each student. Schools that didn't invest would not attract paying customers. Providing the level of service & extra amenities students expect is expensive, and carries a lot of overhead support cost from administrative staff. > making the process of educating less costly by using technology Technology is not a silver bullet. The cost of delivering education at scale is not where the waste is. Much like the healthcare sector, there is a huge administrative infrastructure at every school dedicated to facilitating a complex system of loans, grants, scholarships, individual payments, etc., for accounting. These jobs are unlikely to be eliminated with automation. The best answer is to make them unnecessary outright. > if a degree was about what you know, not just a credential A degree has never been about what you know, otherwise we'd award them to everyone who has equivalent work and life experience. But it's also not just a credential. The value of college is not limited to the academic requirements. A society benefits from an informed and educated populace, and from the personal growth that happens when smart folks learn together. That isn't to say that the country club lifestyle of American colleges today is providing services worth the cost...
  - zanny 11y ago
    You might be making the false correlation that education == schooling from reading your comment. Being schooled does not make you educated, and you can be educated without being schooled. Just because today the expectation in the west is extensive schooling to provide education does not mean that is the best way (or even a viable way for many) to be educated. Personally I want there to be more coop learning. Combining democratic resources like wikibooks / open courseware and like minded individuals that want to learn the same things, plus a potential volunteer veteran or two, and for a lot of people that can produce a much better education than an overpriced book and lecture seminar with standardized testing ever could. For others, apprenticeship may be optimal. Or fully automated programs like Code Academy or Khan's Academy might be best for some, where they learn best through self-enforcement and learn-at-your-own-pace self pacing. One of the largest takeaways from the past twenty years should be that trying to push a generation through traditional lecture-based coursework in classical university settings is not a one size fits all solution to education, and that it did not work - this article presents plenty of statistics denoting the failure of that model. Edit: Side note, I think Stack Overflow is a great model for tutelage in the future. That is basically what it already is for the entire software community, and they have expanded the model into many other disciplines - that kind of ask a question, the community decides on the best answer, and once solved is locked / memorialized for others to easily find when they themselves encounter the same question is immensely valuable. It would be revolutionary to get most people answering their own questions through resources like that.
tomjen3 11y ago
Or we have fewer kids today than we have old people, which means we spend more money on old people than on kids?
- spangry 11y ago
  That's not really the case in the US: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-113.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-113... Gen Y is more than 1 quarter of the US population and outnumber the baby-boomers. We're the children of the baby boomers, hence the alternative name for Gen Y: 'echo boomers'.
  - tomjen3 11y ago
    It is only the very tail-end of that group which are still in HS or below. You need the numbers for the kids born between (say) 1998 and 2015-minus whatever year they start preschool. Also baby boomers may have retired but most don't need to be in a nursing home yet (which is the really expensive part).
    - spangry 11y ago
      Ah, sorry. I misread your post. At least in Australia, the really expensive 'contingent liability' (i.e. future tax burden on Gen Y) comes from health care expenditure, which tends to sky-rocket as one grows older. Might be different in the US given the more limited government expenditure on public health.
tosseraccount 11y ago
"voting to cut taxes". What? See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law Actual tax situation is this : In the United States, federal tax revenues since World War II have always been approximately equal to 19.5% of GDP, regardless of wide fluctuations in the marginal tax rate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law I'll agree with you if your saying that growing government spending is a big problem, though. And of course you'll find wide disagreement on whether we need to cut spending or raise taxes to deal with it.
- spangry 11y ago
  The graph on that page seems to say otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law#/media/File:U.S.-Tax-Revenues-As-GDP-Percentage-(75-05).JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law#/media/File:U.S... Just eyeballing it, from 1975 to 2005 the tax to GDP ratio in the US was always above 24% and peaked at 30% in 2000. Is the discrepancy due to State taxes being included in the graph? In a sense you're right. Government spending is the problem: the money was 'spent' over the past few decades but just won't be paid out until grandfathered boomer pensions and medicaid payments fall due. Pretty sweet deal for politicians and boomers: buy political capital from the boomers now, and let the children pay for it later by raising their taxes in future, cutting their entitlements and raising the retirement age so that they'll be working until they're dead. Not that Gen Y are blameless. Politicians respond to incentives just like anyone else. If you don't vote, don't expect them to give a crap about you.
  - tosseraccount 11y ago
    Many generations voted in the elections. Just to clarify, you're blaming one of them? An image from the same page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law#/media/File:U.S._Federal_Tax_Receipts_as_a_Percentage_of_GDP_1945%E2%80%932015.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law#/media/File:U.S._... . Folks argue a lot but rate is fairly steady.
  - spangry 11y ago
    Seems we're at maximum comment depth.. In answer to your question: no. I'm not blaming anyone who turned up to vote. I'm blaming those who didn't turn up to vote. http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/demographics/CPS%20age.png?attredirects=0 http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/demographics/... The most recent data from the US Census Bureau indicates that the turnout rate for the 18-29 age group is at the lowest it's ever been since at least 1986 (this is as far back as the charted data goes). They are the age group with the lowest participation.
joesmo 11y ago
I suspect once the baby boomers are gone things will slowly start to improve. They are generally the ones who both invented and keep alive such atrocities as the drug war, our un-winnable foreign wars in too many countries to keep track of, and countless other insanities they either perpetrated themselves or took to a new level. Seriously, how can you expect socialism when both ruling parties are only interested in war, war, war, of all kinds and have absolutely no interest in education or their children's future (environment, opportunities, health care, etc.). Look what it took just to get a healthcare bill that says you have a right to buy health insurance passed. Before that, fuck off and die you sick bastard was the policy for sick, poor people, many of them young. Or education, which is now mostly unreachable except for the truly rich. The governing consensus (of most boomers who rule congress) is that we should be making money off of our young people instead of helping them get educated. I wonder why they're doing worse than other generations economically when they're being exploited by their parents generation without a hint of compassion. Student loans cannot even be gotten rid of if you declare bankruptcy. This thought is both extremely sad and extremely hopeful. It's sad because there are a lot of boomers who I love dearly in my life as with probably most everyone here. It's hopeful because a lot of young people, including myself, are fucking sick and tired of being exploited by the old for their literally insane pursuits (mostly war and hate). In this sense, death is a welcome factor. I'm certain I'm not part of the first generation to think this about their elders nor am I part of the rest. The old, outdated, stupid, insane, cruel, hateful, hurtful ideas have to go and unfortunately the only thing that ever helps in such situations is death. Death is truly, the bringer of change, and in the current status quo, hopeful change.
- hueving 11y ago
  The healthcare bill took forever to pass because of its half-assed marketplace that's offering terrible healthcare for lots of people. $621/mo premium with everything out of pocket up to a $6,000 deductible is a joke. That's as much as a mortgage payment for many people and it amounts to nothing more than catastrophic coverage.
  - joesmo 11y ago
    And that's for one young, healthy person! The plans available, coverage, and costs are terrible. I can't imagine how regular workers making < $100k are paying those premiums and they're going up by about $50/year consistently. The bill had many other good provisions, but other than Medicaid expansion (which was turned down once again by mostly baby boomer asshole governors whose demonstrated compassion and empathy levels are so low they don't belong in the human race) none of them actually provides health care. It creates a market, and like you say, not a very good one, and fixes problems that shouldn't have existed in the first place like denying people coverage because they're sick (preexisting conditions) or went a month without coverage. And this is amazing progress and the best we can expect in America from the mostly baby boomer assholes in power. But if we repeat mindlessly that America is the greatest country on earth enough, we can overlook the fact that it is dead last in healthcare out of all developed countries. Why socialize medicine, pharmaceuticals, and other industries that profit off of people's misfortunes, sickness, and death? Why not profit off of other people's misfortunes, sickness, and death? Die already so I can get rich. That is the American way, after all, and that's why those prices are so fucking high.
jayess 11y ago
"Throughout human history, the old have subsidised the young." Is that true though? Having lots of kids so they can work on the farm and mom and dad living with you until they die?
- revelation 11y ago
  It's true if you consider there is something between old and young.
WalterBright 11y ago
> Speaking in broad strokes (i.e. I'm sure there are plenty of individual examples to the contrary) the baby boom generation is the most selfish generation in recent history, voting to cut taxes and benefits for government and societal services after they had gotten their full use out of them. The government spends more than ever as a percent of GDP: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total_spending_chart http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total_spending_chart except for during WW2. This does not look like any recent austerity program.
- soared 11y ago
  Are you supporting OP's comment? Higher spending doesn't indicate where that money is going - older or younger generations.
- hiram112 11y ago
  Not sure what your point is. About 60% of the federal budget is Social Security and Medicare. Besides defense (a large chunk of which is VA and pensions), the other big ticket item is SSDI which lso goes to the older at a very high rate. So it seems like the majority of federal dollars do, in fact, go to the elderly.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    I'm not denying that - but the benefits have not been cut. The spending is larger than ever. The increase in government spending correlates with the hollowing out of the middle class. I'm very skeptical that even more spending will reverse it - sort of like building giant air conditioners to combat global warming.
jliptzin 11y ago
Imagine how many young people would vote if we had online voting.
- soared 11y ago
  Imagine if you were find $100 for not voting (Australia).

magicGLASSman 11y ago

Why not get to the root of the problem? An education should not cost that much. Much of the reason the cost has outpaced inflation is the subsidizing of the tuition price paid by the student instead of making the process of educating less costly by using technology. Imagine what would happen if a degree was about what you know, not just a credential.

reirob 11y ago
Education should not cost anything at all. Full stop. Free education for everybody should be considered the biggest achievement by human beings. If a society is not able to provide free education for the upcoming generations, then the basis of such a society should be questioned, rightfully so.
- mafribe 11y ago
  Education should not cost anything at all. Bikeshedding! Education always costs a great deal. Teachers need to be paid, schools need buildings, universities needs labs, etc. The only question is how payments are organised: taxes, fees, some hybrid ... Whatever mechanism is chosen, somebody feels hard up and will seek to change it. Yet, it's always the old paying for the education of the young, just like it is always the young paying the oldies' pensions.
- cturner 11y ago
  Is there a limit to your principle? Should people be able to live at university forever, with a living wage from the public purse? What if they were enrolled but didn't ever attend? Should the government even be involved in education? Were it not for government protection, what kind of disruption would we have seen to the education sector by now? Given that university-educated people earn more than other taxpayers, why is it unreasonable to expect that they should be responsible for covering the cost of their education? Consider the deferred payment system of the Australian model. The Swiss model is interesting as well. In Switzerland, each university has to take whoever wants to go. But there's no rules about the conditions that they give you when you get there. So if 200 people applied and they were only set up for 50 places, they could give aptitude tests to them all, and then put seats and books in the gym for the remaining 150 with instruction to submit one difficult major project for pass-fail assessment each per semester.
  - orf 11y ago
    > Should the government even be involved in education? Were it not for government protection, what kind of disruption would we have seen to the education sector by now? More for profit colleges?
  - ollifi 11y ago
    > Should people be able to live at university forever, with a living wage from the public purse? What if they were enrolled but didn't ever attend? One way to sort it is the finnish system where you have certain amount of months you can get paid for. Your courses are tracked and if you are enrolled but are not advancing fast enough you need to payback your benefits. If you advance to further studies you can get more months, but eventually you run out of them. There is only so many places available to study and you need to take test to get into most places. It's not without its problems and it certainly is not 'free'.
npalli 11y ago
> Much of the reason the cost has outpaced inflation is the subsidizing of the tuition price But is this really true? Student tuition debt would say otherwise. In any case, you should follow the money and see where all this cost increase has landed. Certainly isn't the professor/TA salaries. Most of the increase has flowed into administrative costs. An entire bureaucratic edifice has been constructed that contributes nothing to education. Same with healthcare. Guess what, most of the bureaucrats are Boomers!. One more reason to designate the Boomers as the worst generation.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  This is what happens when incentives for efficiency are removed. In industries with large amounts of regulation we see this over and over. In education with more than 50% of money spent on administration it's just particularly obvious.
cgearhart 11y ago
> An education should not cost that much. This is true, but it is not the root cause of the problem - and it is a distraction from the issue because it places the blame on providers. In the past, there was no significant incentive for the cost of higher education to increase at the pace we've seen for the last 20-30 years. The big mistake was pushing for individual loans for each student to pay for college rather than subsidizing the system. This created distorted incentives where schools needed to spend money on "extra" things to attract students who had money to spend, rather than trying to push down the cost of providing quality education to each student. Schools that didn't invest would not attract paying customers. Providing the level of service & extra amenities students expect is expensive, and carries a lot of overhead support cost from administrative staff. > making the process of educating less costly by using technology Technology is not a silver bullet. The cost of delivering education at scale is not where the waste is. Much like the healthcare sector, there is a huge administrative infrastructure at every school dedicated to facilitating a complex system of loans, grants, scholarships, individual payments, etc., for accounting. These jobs are unlikely to be eliminated with automation. The best answer is to make them unnecessary outright. > if a degree was about what you know, not just a credential A degree has never been about what you know, otherwise we'd award them to everyone who has equivalent work and life experience. But it's also not just a credential. The value of college is not limited to the academic requirements. A society benefits from an informed and educated populace, and from the personal growth that happens when smart folks learn together. That isn't to say that the country club lifestyle of American colleges today is providing services worth the cost...
- zanny 11y ago
  You might be making the false correlation that education == schooling from reading your comment. Being schooled does not make you educated, and you can be educated without being schooled. Just because today the expectation in the west is extensive schooling to provide education does not mean that is the best way (or even a viable way for many) to be educated. Personally I want there to be more coop learning. Combining democratic resources like wikibooks / open courseware and like minded individuals that want to learn the same things, plus a potential volunteer veteran or two, and for a lot of people that can produce a much better education than an overpriced book and lecture seminar with standardized testing ever could. For others, apprenticeship may be optimal. Or fully automated programs like Code Academy or Khan's Academy might be best for some, where they learn best through self-enforcement and learn-at-your-own-pace self pacing. One of the largest takeaways from the past twenty years should be that trying to push a generation through traditional lecture-based coursework in classical university settings is not a one size fits all solution to education, and that it did not work - this article presents plenty of statistics denoting the failure of that model. Edit: Side note, I think Stack Overflow is a great model for tutelage in the future. That is basically what it already is for the entire software community, and they have expanded the model into many other disciplines - that kind of ask a question, the community decides on the best answer, and once solved is locked / memorialized for others to easily find when they themselves encounter the same question is immensely valuable. It would be revolutionary to get most people answering their own questions through resources like that.

tomjen3 11y ago

Or we have fewer kids today than we have old people, which means we spend more money on old people than on kids?

spangry 11y ago
That's not really the case in the US: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-113.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-113... Gen Y is more than 1 quarter of the US population and outnumber the baby-boomers. We're the children of the baby boomers, hence the alternative name for Gen Y: 'echo boomers'.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  It is only the very tail-end of that group which are still in HS or below. You need the numbers for the kids born between (say) 1998 and 2015-minus whatever year they start preschool. Also baby boomers may have retired but most don't need to be in a nursing home yet (which is the really expensive part).
  - spangry 11y ago
    Ah, sorry. I misread your post. At least in Australia, the really expensive 'contingent liability' (i.e. future tax burden on Gen Y) comes from health care expenditure, which tends to sky-rocket as one grows older. Might be different in the US given the more limited government expenditure on public health.

tosseraccount 11y ago

"voting to cut taxes". What? See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law Actual tax situation is this : In the United States, federal tax revenues since World War II have always been approximately equal to 19.5% of GDP, regardless of wide fluctuations in the marginal tax rate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law I'll agree with you if your saying that growing government spending is a big problem, though. And of course you'll find wide disagreement on whether we need to cut spending or raise taxes to deal with it.

spangry 11y ago
The graph on that page seems to say otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law#/media/File:U.S.-Tax-Revenues-As-GDP-Percentage-(75-05).JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law#/media/File:U.S... Just eyeballing it, from 1975 to 2005 the tax to GDP ratio in the US was always above 24% and peaked at 30% in 2000. Is the discrepancy due to State taxes being included in the graph? In a sense you're right. Government spending is the problem: the money was 'spent' over the past few decades but just won't be paid out until grandfathered boomer pensions and medicaid payments fall due. Pretty sweet deal for politicians and boomers: buy political capital from the boomers now, and let the children pay for it later by raising their taxes in future, cutting their entitlements and raising the retirement age so that they'll be working until they're dead. Not that Gen Y are blameless. Politicians respond to incentives just like anyone else. If you don't vote, don't expect them to give a crap about you.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  Many generations voted in the elections. Just to clarify, you're blaming one of them? An image from the same page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law#/media/File:U.S._Federal_Tax_Receipts_as_a_Percentage_of_GDP_1945%E2%80%932015.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law#/media/File:U.S._... . Folks argue a lot but rate is fairly steady.
- spangry 11y ago
  Seems we're at maximum comment depth.. In answer to your question: no. I'm not blaming anyone who turned up to vote. I'm blaming those who didn't turn up to vote. http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/demographics/CPS%20age.png?attredirects=0 http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/demographics/... The most recent data from the US Census Bureau indicates that the turnout rate for the 18-29 age group is at the lowest it's ever been since at least 1986 (this is as far back as the charted data goes). They are the age group with the lowest participation.

joesmo 11y ago

I suspect once the baby boomers are gone things will slowly start to improve. They are generally the ones who both invented and keep alive such atrocities as the drug war, our un-winnable foreign wars in too many countries to keep track of, and countless other insanities they either perpetrated themselves or took to a new level. Seriously, how can you expect socialism when both ruling parties are only interested in war, war, war, of all kinds and have absolutely no interest in education or their children's future (environment, opportunities, health care, etc.). Look what it took just to get a healthcare bill that says you have a right to buy health insurance passed. Before that, fuck off and die you sick bastard was the policy for sick, poor people, many of them young. Or education, which is now mostly unreachable except for the truly rich. The governing consensus (of most boomers who rule congress) is that we should be making money off of our young people instead of helping them get educated. I wonder why they're doing worse than other generations economically when they're being exploited by their parents generation without a hint of compassion. Student loans cannot even be gotten rid of if you declare bankruptcy. This thought is both extremely sad and extremely hopeful. It's sad because there are a lot of boomers who I love dearly in my life as with probably most everyone here. It's hopeful because a lot of young people, including myself, are fucking sick and tired of being exploited by the old for their literally insane pursuits (mostly war and hate). In this sense, death is a welcome factor. I'm certain I'm not part of the first generation to think this about their elders nor am I part of the rest. The old, outdated, stupid, insane, cruel, hateful, hurtful ideas have to go and unfortunately the only thing that ever helps in such situations is death. Death is truly, the bringer of change, and in the current status quo, hopeful change.

hueving 11y ago
The healthcare bill took forever to pass because of its half-assed marketplace that's offering terrible healthcare for lots of people. $621/mo premium with everything out of pocket up to a $6,000 deductible is a joke. That's as much as a mortgage payment for many people and it amounts to nothing more than catastrophic coverage.
- joesmo 11y ago
  And that's for one young, healthy person! The plans available, coverage, and costs are terrible. I can't imagine how regular workers making < $100k are paying those premiums and they're going up by about $50/year consistently. The bill had many other good provisions, but other than Medicaid expansion (which was turned down once again by mostly baby boomer asshole governors whose demonstrated compassion and empathy levels are so low they don't belong in the human race) none of them actually provides health care. It creates a market, and like you say, not a very good one, and fixes problems that shouldn't have existed in the first place like denying people coverage because they're sick (preexisting conditions) or went a month without coverage. And this is amazing progress and the best we can expect in America from the mostly baby boomer assholes in power. But if we repeat mindlessly that America is the greatest country on earth enough, we can overlook the fact that it is dead last in healthcare out of all developed countries. Why socialize medicine, pharmaceuticals, and other industries that profit off of people's misfortunes, sickness, and death? Why not profit off of other people's misfortunes, sickness, and death? Die already so I can get rich. That is the American way, after all, and that's why those prices are so fucking high.

jayess 11y ago

"Throughout human history, the old have subsidised the young." Is that true though? Having lots of kids so they can work on the farm and mom and dad living with you until they die?

revelation 11y ago
It's true if you consider there is something between old and young.

WalterBright 11y ago

> Speaking in broad strokes (i.e. I'm sure there are plenty of individual examples to the contrary) the baby boom generation is the most selfish generation in recent history, voting to cut taxes and benefits for government and societal services after they had gotten their full use out of them. The government spends more than ever as a percent of GDP: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total_spending_chart http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total_spending_chart except for during WW2. This does not look like any recent austerity program.

soared 11y ago
Are you supporting OP's comment? Higher spending doesn't indicate where that money is going - older or younger generations.
hiram112 11y ago
Not sure what your point is. About 60% of the federal budget is Social Security and Medicare. Besides defense (a large chunk of which is VA and pensions), the other big ticket item is SSDI which lso goes to the older at a very high rate. So it seems like the majority of federal dollars do, in fact, go to the elderly.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  I'm not denying that - but the benefits have not been cut. The spending is larger than ever. The increase in government spending correlates with the hollowing out of the middle class. I'm very skeptical that even more spending will reverse it - sort of like building giant air conditioners to combat global warming.

jliptzin 11y ago

Imagine how many young people would vote if we had online voting.

soared 11y ago
Imagine if you were find $100 for not voting (Australia).