There's a terribly toxic combination at work here - a demographic bubble, lifespans (but often not productive lifespans) extended by modern medicine, high cost

There's a terribly toxic combination at work here - a demographic bubble, lifespans (but often not productive lifespans) extended by modern medicine, high cost of that modern medicine, declining market value of skills held by the older generation, flat middle-class earnings, near-total elimination of defined benefit programs, and a series of financial shocks eroding the value of stock-market alternatives. The result is akin to an epidemic - millions of older people physically able and likely to live a few more decades, but financially not even capable of making it another year without help. Scary. The GOP/libertarian answer is likely to be that "too young to die" isn't true. No, they won't come out and say it, but the policies they promote come down to that. "Just die already, it'll be good for the economy (or at least the stock market)." Problem is, they won't die. They'll end up in hospitals more often, or prisons. If you think nobody has deliberately gone to jail just to ensure three squares and health care, think again. Some will end up in their children's homes, which can be great sometimes but is more often a drain on those children's own prospects. Many will end up on the streets. The rich families who send their kids to Washington or Wall Street won't be affected and thus mostly own't care, but it will be a literal disaster for everyone else. Like it or not, the only real choice is for us as a society to do more to look after the elderly. Not only is it the humane choice, but when you add up all the costs of the alternative that's even worse. And no, we can't rely on private charity to do the job. There's nowhere near enough organized charity for that, and at the individual level very very few of the people affluent enough to offer help will go anywhere near somebody else's poor grandmother. I'm extremely fortunate that I can afford to pay for my mother to be in a nice assisted living facility, but everything below that is a hellhole and my personal solution doesn't scale to all of society.