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| I've suspected this for a while now. Good to have something that supports my suspicions, so I don't come across as a complete conspiracy nut. From Vox: How the âGrim Reaper effectâ stops our government from saving lives  When curing disease is bad for the federal budget. Well, perhaps our (this is a US article about the US) government's job isn't to save lives. There's a bit of background I'll skip just to get to the point: Simply put: Curing hep C means people live longer, which means they spend more years collecting Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits. That could mean that whatever cost savings the actual hep C treatment produces might be wiped out by the fact that the people whose lives are being saved will be cashing retirement checks for longer. Yes. They only need us as long as we're productive. After that, just die already so we can stop paying you. Put together, the deficit and the elder-biased composition of federal spending implies something that is equally important and macabre: Helping people live longer lives will, all else being equal, be bad for the federal budget. I've sometimes speculated (being a writer and all) on what would happen if, by some technology or magic, all human diseases were suddenly eliminated. That's a good thing, right? Yeah, from one point of view. From another, it would cause utter chaos. Worse if we could also eliminate aging and death: that would be reserved for the secret cabal of elite rich overlords. Okay, maybe I'm a bit of a conspiracy nut. I donât have an easy fix for the situation, but it feels important to at least understand. I'm not even sure it can be fixed, except for leaving the government out of it entirely, which practically nobody in either major party wants to do (perhaps because they are the government). There are a couple more examples, including cigarette taxes and covid, and then they had to go and make a literary reference: It all reminds one of Loganâs Run, in which people are killed off upon hitting age 30 lest they take up too many of societyâs resources. That movie is a dystopia â but as a budget proposal, itâd score very well. Okay, look. I get that more people watch movies than read. Hell, I watch more movies than I read books, these days. But Logan's Run was a film adaptation of a book, and, as is usually the case, the book was far superior. One of the many things they changed in the movie was that you hit Lastday at 30. In the book, it was 21. Yes, you read that right. They did keep the idea of Runners; that is, people who rejected the cutoff and tried to escape. Now, it's been a while since I've either seen the movie or read the book, so I may be misremembering some details, but that much, I'm sure of (I just verified it on Wikipedia, I mean). But that's not the important point; just an illustration of why you don't, for example, quote the movie Frankenstein when you're trying to make a point about the book Frankenstein. (Quoting Young Frankenstein is, of course, always appropriate.) No, what I'm trying to say is that the dystopia created for Logan's Run (either version) was that the birth rate got too high, skewing the population young. (This was a big talking point in the 60s, when the novel came out.) The particular dystopia we're suffering through right now is the polar opposite of that. The economists and agencies doing this math are, of course, only doing their jobs. We need to know what government programs will cost over the near- and long-run. I have an intense distrust of any version of the phrase "only doing their jobs." But the fact that increased human longevity on its own worsens the budget picture should lead to some reflection. For one thing, it suggests that sometimes we should embrace policies simply because theyâre the right thing to do, even if they donât pay for themselves. Not something any branch of the government is known for. Lots of things the government does cost money. The military doesnât pay for itself. K-12 schools donât pay for themselves. Smithsonian Museums donât pay for themselves. That doesnât mean those arenât important functions that it makes sense to put some of our tax dollars toward. I could argue some of those examples, but I'm not an economist; I just see that the intangible benefits of these things far outweigh the monetary costs. We can also argue about how much of the budget should be spent on them (and I'd add space exploration to the list), and that's okay; that's what we should be doing in a representative democracy. The government shouldn't be run like a business. It should provide those services that the free market finds too unprofitable to consider. But, of course, people can disagree about that, too. There is no law of nature saying the US has to weigh its priorities that way. As long as we do, the numbers will imply that itâs better for the budget for people to die before they get old. I can't be mad at an article that, after talking about US government policies, ends by paraphrasing a song by the very British band The Who. There is, of course, a lot more at the link; I just hit the points I most wanted to address. I'd suggest reading it for yourself, even if you're not in the US, because some of it might be applicable to other governments, as well. |
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