Bankruptcy by Demographics

UPDATE II: The U.S. government spends $40 billion to $50 billion each year on end-stage kidney disease. Read The New York Times, Asking Kidney Patients to Forgo a Free Lifeline, which highlights one case:

"One patient, a 78-year-old woman whose name is being withheld, was not a good candidate for dialysis, her doctors said. She has complications from diabetes, high blood pressure, a heart valve problem and severe coronary artery disease. Her medical problems were so grave that dialysis was likely to lead to a series of medical interventions — hospital stays, drugs and doctor visits — but would not necessarily prolong her life. And her doctors told her that.

But she insisted on dialysis, saying, 'Some life is better than no life.' In the seven months she has been on dialysis, she has been hospitalized four times, including twice for heart surgery.

'I go to dialysis because I want to live,' she said in a telephone interview. 'I want dialysis.'"

UPDATE: Medicare doesn't cover everything. So how much do you need to save? A lot. Read The New York Times, Getting Old Is Expensive.

Should old people just die younger and quicker? Read the Washington Post, A growth lesson from China, which predicts a pretty bleak future for the U.S.:

"This demographic destiny might entail starving every other sector of society -- including national defense, at great cost to America's international standing. It had better not, given what Fogel argues in another essay, this one in the current issue of Foreign Policy. It carries the headline "$123,000,000,000,000." Fogel's subheadline is: "China's estimated economy by the year 2040. Be warned."

He expects that by 2040 China's GDP will be $123 trillion, or three times the entire world's economic output in 2000. He says China's per capita income will be more than double what is forecast for the European Union. China's 40 percent share of global GDP will be almost triple that of the United States' 14 percent.

Fogel finds many reasons for this, including the increased productivity of the 700 million (55 percent) rural Chinese. But he especially stresses "the enormous investment China is making in education."

While China increasingly invests in its future, America increasingly invests in its past: the elderly. China's ascent to global economic hegemony could be slowed or derailed by unforeseen scarcities or social fissures. America's destiny is demographic, and therefore is inexorable and predictable, which makes the nation's fiscal mismanagement, by both parties, especially shocking."

Tell your kids to learn Chinese.