If you haven’t heard the predictions of baby boomers bleeding Social Security and Medicare dry, then you’ve probably been sharing Osama Bin Laden’s cave. According to A National Center for Policy Analysis Project “in just 15 years, the federal government will have to raise taxes, reduce other spending or borrow $761 billion to keep its promises to America’s senior citizens.” However, this outcome is not inevitable.

Due to our numbers, we boomers have set trends for every era we’ve passed through, and old age need be no exception. I’m not sure how to save Social Security, but I believe the choices we make can save Medicare and our health-care delivery system as a whole for generations to come.

Many do not realize that affordable health care is much like the nation’s oil supplies. Over consumption leads to higher prices and less availability. In this analogy, current older Americans are like the SUV owners––consuming the biggest share and increasing prices for all of us.

Lest this sound too damning of our elderly population, it is only fair to point out that the WWII generation has served as guinea pigs for a vast experiment. They are the first generation to benefit from a wealth of medical achievements that prolong the length, if not always the quality of life, and are exhorted by healthcare givers and their boomer children to “not go gently into that goodnight” but to fight it at every turn.

We have arrived at the point where it is taken for granted that an 85-year-old will undergo the same aggressive cancer treatment as a 35-year-old––assuming the 35-year-old has equal healthcare coverage and can afford it. Prolonging life, even a very debilitated life and even for a very short time, has become the driving focus.

The resulting economic cost to society is obvious in the phenomenal price we pay for health care. The emotional cost is less obvious. Like a death-row inmate going through the appeals process, the elderly and their loved ones ride a constant roller coaster of sentences and reprieves, often shocked or outraged when the inevitable final sentence is pronounced. Death at any age is now seen as a preventable accident or the result of malpractice.

Increasingly, my fellow boomers proclaim that they will not fall prey to this trap. Eternal life, after all, is of little value absent eternal youth. My friends claim that in their old age they will weigh the quality against the length of their lives. We will not tote oxygen tanks, undergo multiple bypasses, or accept treatments that ravage us worse than the cancer they target and, in the end, only postpone the inevitable by making the march painfully slow.

Will we be true to our words? When the time comes will we go smoothly through that doorway or be dragged out hanging onto both walls? It is often said that no one wants to live to 100 except the 99-year-old. Yet, if we trendsetting baby boomers assert our rights to forgo life-prolonging interventions, we can leave much to posterity. We can make health care more affordable for those who truly need it: young working parents and their children. We can stop the overtaxing of young workers to subsidize health care for the aged. We can halt the march toward an aging, less productive society, and, most important, we can spare our children the agonizing decision to ration health care for the elderly, so that their own children can live better lives.

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