[jojopotato]

Every country with a declining birth rate and a promise to the older generation has massive unfunded liabilities. The United States, China, Japan, everyone is having to deal with the problem of "How do we pay for the elderly when we have so few children?"

I'm not saying I have an answer, but we need to address the real question previous generations never had to face before, which is how much burden do we want to put onto the younger generation to take care of the older one when there are so much fewer young people? At what point do you say "The cost to keep Grandma alive another 6 months costs too much."?

[cwan]

My problem with this is that in effect we are asking the young to pay for services that they will not ever see. There is a fundamental fairness problem here. It's also not as if governments (and many people who voted for them) never understood the demographics.

As for keeping Grandma alive, the closer we come to a government run system, the less you will be in control of what happens to your Grandma and instead subject to increasingly draconian policies of what is and isn't covered given that governments the world over are trying to do more with dwindling resources - something is going to give.

[jojopotato]

I guess my point was really that because the demographics are so bad, we're going to have to downgrade our expectations for quality and length of care for the elderly, and nobody wants to think about that.