A peculiar thing happened in our nation in the aftermath of World War Two, pretty much all of our young men came home, and set about finding a young woman, and then having children, all at the same time! This huge group or generation of babies is called the baby boomers, because of the huge boom of numbers of babies after World War Two. The baby boomers have been associated with a lot of radical changes in our nation, the civil rights movement, the pacifist movement in the Vietnam War, and many other social changes have been wrought by this baby boomer generation. Now we are facing a huge medical crisis, possibly the biggest challenge to our healthcare system to date, all the baby boomers are getting old.

            That’s right, it doesn’t really sound like a huge problem at first, but then you start to realize the gravity of the situation when your presented with the facts of our healthcare system, and how small our intensive care units really are in hospitals today. Now consider this many of our people suffer from a variety of terminal and incurable diseases when they get old, there’s heart diseases, cancers of all types, neural problems, and a host of others, that all require a bed in intensive care, now it isn’t too taxing on the system today, but what happens when we get this influx of the baby boomer generation? It is impossible with the system we currently have to take care of maybe one fourth of the patients they will most likely receive, and that’s being kind to the system. Think of the costs of taking care of all these people too, it would be astronomical, a standard intensive care bed and care is 20,000 dollars a day, that’s a new Toyota corolla a day! This puts enormous pressure on what we call today the sandwich generation who are the offspring of the baby boomers, and have to shoulder the responsibility for their own children and their parents at the same time. This is unacceptable, we cannot just sit by and watch this all unfold like this, it’s time to take action.

What action can be taken though it’s a tough question, do we simply let the people die at home, because we have no more room in our intensive care ward, how do we pick and choose who gets care and who doesn’t? Well first of all we need to reevaluate the laws concerning whether or not the person has a right to die, the baby boomers have been the source and cause of many radical social changes, they aren’t going to want to sit around costing their family hundreds of thousands of dollars, they will take action whether we like it or not, so we need to investigate how to make the right to die a feasible solution. We also need the government to stop pouring all its money into the pharmaceutical companies and put its resources behind bigger and better hospitals, hospitals where the main concern is with intensive and palliative care. We need the government or private corporations to start funding research on how to make palliative and intensive care less costly with new innovations and technologies. All this needs to start soon, and by soon I mean tomorrow, because if it does not happen very soon then we will start to see huge numbers and much higher rates of elder abuse, elder suicide, and our nation’s healthcare system will most likely crumble in a shadow of what it once was. We cannot sit idly by while our elders the ones that led us through so much social and political change just die in the gutters of our cities with nothing but their shame and poverty there to be with them, we must stand up and take care of our elders, like they did for us when we were young and foolish.