The Geriatric Nation.

                   There are 5,580,9000 Canadians over the age of  65 as of this summer.
 There has been 0.09% population growth in the past year.  There are more seniors than children for the first time in Canada's history.
 

      We tend to generalize when we are talking about health care and other social responsibilities   As long as we are talking about statistics of age and  health care and the philosophy of "free" medical care, everyone with a brain will sooner or later come to the conclusion that with growing numbers of old people and falling numbers of  productive young wage earners the system is sooner or later going to go broke. When reduced to a more personal level it becomes more difficult to decide how the pie will  have to be divided.
     If your best friend had an illness that was serious but treatable with very expensive drugs that he could not afford and you had a savings account to send your kids to University, how much of it would you contribute of the fund towards his life-saving treatment.  Bearing in  mind, there may be  little chance of you getting it back, would you be prepared to give him ten percent, twenty-five per fifty percent if there was a reasonable chance of prolonging his life?    Maybe you would give him a hundred percent, if you were close enough.  Perhaps your generosity would be influenced by the nature of his illness and be less generous if his complaints were largely self-inflicted by such conditions as alcohol or drug abuse or other forms of self abuse.
      Now picture the situation with regard to someone you don't know at all.    How  much  of your retirement savings and your children's future would you be prepared to give him?  How do you feel  about providing a more comfortable life in prison to most criminals often with better medical care than to elderly patients in Nursing Homes.  How do  you feel about supporting those who have never contributed to the health care system, not because they couldn't, but because they didn't want to.Most elderly patient have worked hard all  their life, but it's not politically correct to  make a prisoner work for his keep.  I have seen many of those criminals better provided for and get better medical care than the elderly.
    As the health care budget becomes more and more inadequate with medical  technology becoming prohibitively expensive  and life span continuing  to lengthen, we may have to re-evaluate how health care is distributed.  Everything for everybody will not be available for much  longer, so we had better get our heads out of the sand and start devising a rational way to see that everyone gets as fair a dealt as possible, based on our societal value and that the huge amount of waste within  the health care system is drastically reduced.

Feel free to comment if you dare.