Don't Let Old People Vote!!

I'm serious about this one, you have to be 18 to vote why not a maximum age also? You know, that age when you stop giving a fuck about anything and anyone else around you and only care about your nightly allotments of pudding and re-runs of Matlock or Murder She Wrote? Right there, right about at that point.

It's clear the elderly could give a shit less about the rest of us, but nobody wants to touch them BECAUSE THEY VOTE. Letting them run people over in their cars is much less scary to most politicians.



KEVIN DRUM treats us to some stimulating inside-the-pine-box thinking about Medicare reform:

So Medicare stays roughly the same, but every time you receive medical care you also get a bill. You don't have to pay it, though. It's just there for accounting purposes. When you die, the bill gets paid out of your estate. If your estate is small or nonexistent, you've gotten lots of free medical care. If it's large, you'll pay for it all. If you're somewhere in between, you'll end up paying for part of the care you've received.

Obviously this gives people incentives to spend all their money before they die. That's fine. I suspect they wouldn't end up spending as much as you'd think. What it does mean, though, is that Medicare has first claim on their estate, not their kids. But that seems fair, doesn't it?
That does seem fair, at first blush. Mr Drum says, "Conservatives should love this idea". And why shouldn't they? Making ex-people posthumously pay whatever their estates can bear, while reducing the riches that flow to their heirs, strikes a double blow for individual responsibility. Mr Drum does recognise that his plan for beyond-the-grave financing faces serious practical obstacles, but I fear he has not fully grasped the game of regulatory whack-a-mole such a plan would set in motion.

I've got a better idea. Don't give the elderly rich any government money for health care. Let them pay for it, because they're rich! And give other seniors just the assistance they need—no more, no less—to buy a health plan of a certain minimum level of coverage. Now, I know this is a fantastical idea for crazed, science-hating, Rand-thumping Jacobins, amounts to destroying Medicare as we know it, and is good for nothing but losing elections. But for all that it seems at least as practical as picking over dead peoples' estates.

Anyway, none of this really matters. America is not actually in the market for creative proposals to put Medicare on a sound footing. Slate's David Weigel explains how New York Democrat Kathy Hochul took a page out of the 2010 GOP playbook and scared old people about Medicare all the way to a seat in the House of Representatives:

Hochul started with, and stuck to, one simple message: Vote for me, and I'll protect Medicare. After Ryan introduced his budget, she honed in on the part of it that turned Medicare from a guarantee into a "premium support" plan for people who are currently 55 or younger.
A split conservative ticket didn't hurt, either, but Mr Ryan's voucher plan surely helped a lot. (Mr Ryan's plan, part of his larger budget bill, went down to defeat in the senate yesterday, along with three other proposed budgets, which all fared even worse.) Pledging to do nothing about Medicare but to "protect" it from the depredations of would-be reformers promises to remain an excellent electoral strategy. Meanwhile, something needs to be done about Medicare. I think my colleague at Free Exchange has nailed the political dynamic:

Both parties have, somewhere inside them, a serious proposal to reform Medicare. If they thought they could be elected by offering such a plan, they would do so. But any serious attempt to reform Medicare is going to be unpopular because it will cost the elderly something, and the elderly are on the way to becoming 30% of the voting population. Thus, the opposing party is inevitably going to use such a proposal to kill the other at the next election without advancing an alternative. And since both parties know this, the only Medicare plans they offer voters will be lemons.
I would add: that nearly a third of the voting public is 65 or older does not quite capture the overwhelming electoral heft of seniors. Retirees are disproportionately likely to actually show up at the polls. Moreover, the interests of seniors are more unified than those of younger voters whose electoral might is divided between often competing and offsetting interest groups. The votes of small business owners and school teachers tend to cancel each other out, but America's silver foxes constitute a more or less consolidated force fighting for the protection of old-age entitlements. Even reform proposals that would preserve the status quo system for those at or near retirement are out of the question. Once it is conceded that Medicare is touchable, what's to keep the selfish young punks who don't want their country to collapse under the burden of entitlement spending from touching what is owed to the Greatest Generation and their supremely entitled Boomer offspring, who have already sacrficed so much?

End of life care is a ridiculously expensive boondoggle but I'm pretty sure there's a better solution than denying the right to vote. Compulsory voting, for example, is a far less radical proposition.

I think we're talking about a whole lot more than just end-of-life care here H. I think the text in between the lines is that Medicare will be such a divisive issue moving forward that the sheer political/electoral suicide from offering up reform to it will keep any such reform from existing. Essentially, the overwhelming amount of now-elderly, baby boomer voters will hogtie the issue of Medicare reform for as long as there's politicians like Hochul that are willing to cherry pick a hotbed issue and drive it home to win elections.

Isn't that the issue here Mnesarch? Isn't the answer to all of this fairly simple? We need more bold politicians that can explain to the public the errors of our ways thus far and why we have to pay for our mistakes moving forward. I've came to that conclusion and dealt with it already. I know social security won't be there when I need it. I don't sign up for Medicaid, even though I'm eligible and in mediocre health, because I can afford to pay for my meds and office visits, and I'd rather the funds be used for someone that cannot afford to do so. This was an easy decision. It's my personal responsibility to take care of myself as far as the fruits of my labor can take me.

The question in my head is, how do we get someone elected who is charismatic and articulate enough to deliver the bad news? But hey, if there is another way to make people realize that they can't vote to hogtie reform, I'm all ears.

I thought that the problem was twofold. First of all, the elderly have disproportionate influence over the political process. Secondly, healthcare costs rise exponentially as old people prepare to die.

Rescinding suffrage is an incredibly controversial method of addressing the former issue. I cite compulsory voting as one of many more practical alternatives. The second issue is a bit trickier. Although it's a political impossibility, I'd like to see the fabled death panels in action. More specifically, I advocate a low-deductable single payer system for the 'cheap' stuff and private insurance or out of pocket payment for expensive procedures meant to stave off death for a matter of months.

Given the Libertarian leanings of this forum's members, I reckon that Karl Denninger's views will be popular: "we can't afford to provide 'every last option' for those who have no resources to spend of their own, yet have contracted an illness that we cannot, within reasonable medical certainty, offer a cure for."

Once the liberals get commenting more, we won't have a Libertarian-leaning forum! That's certainly not the intention anyways....

Sociopolitical problems are inbred and more extreme in younger generations. Like the Porno for Pyros song goes:
Children are innocent
Teenagers fucked up in the head
Adults are even more fucked up
and Elderlies are like children...

I'd be all for an aptitude test for voting eligibility, but age is not a significant problem. A much higher percentage of people over 60 understand central banking and political scumbaggery than any other age group. Of course you are right that old folks are largely set in counterproductive ways and become entirely hopeless once alzheimers etc takes hold. Test em all.... History, math, english...rights and laws...whatever... Equality doesn't have to mean "no standards"