When the Boomers are Gone, Will Gen X’s Time Be Up?

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The massive Boomer generation, which enjoys government health benefits in a system that restrains government authority to some degree, has wielded a political cudgel for decades on issues like healthcare because of their sheer numbers advantage. Gen Xers will not have the numbers to be similarly effective in the democratic defense of its interests, and once single-payer is instituted, the government will be largely unrestrained.  This all portends the very real possibility of large-scale elimination of life-saving care for elderly citizens in order to preserve resources for other, more productive beneficiaries of the single-payer system.

This isn’t some far-fetched fantasy.  Canadians have already found a creative way to eliminate life-saving care to elderly patients — they eliminate the patients. An honest way to describe what they’re prescribing would be “coerced suicide for the benefit of the State,” but the preferred marketing in Canada, currently, is “Medical Assistance in Dying,” or MAID.  Acronyms like that tend to dull the sting of tried-and-failed euphemisms like “assisted suicide” or “medically assisted death.”  But the fact is, says Aaron Trachtenberg of the University of Calgary, in “a resource-limited healthcare system… cost has to be a part of the discussion.”

“It’s just the reality of working in a system of finite resources,” he says. 

And it costs a lot to die in a government-run hospital, as you can imagine.  “Canadians die in hospitals more often than in America,” he says, because “Canada has a lack of palliative care services.”  But they’re “trying to improve that,” he says.

What is obvious, but goes unsaid because it would highlight the inferiority of a single-payer healthcare system, is that America has better and more plentiful avenues for end-of-life care outside of hospitals because Americans aren’t generally entitled to end-of-life care funded by the government, and they thus pay for it themselves in a growing private market which provides more comfortable options at a cheaper price than the hospice option provided by a government healthcare monopoly.

And lucky for the government, there’s no shortage of Canadians signing up for the program.  “Medically assisted death” says Dr. Robert Malone, has “really taken off as a major cause of death in Canada.”

The Canadian politburos and academics like Trachtenberg would have you believe that it’s only cancer patients with days left to live allowing doctors to kill them, but that’s not the case.  Interestingly, there are a large number of people taking the government offer to help them kill themselves because they are disabled, and just can’t pay their bills. 

Joannie Cowie, a 52 year-old Canadian, had epilepsy since she was six years old, but was able to work for most of her life.  But her disabilities piled up, and as of 2022, she and her daughter lived on a government disability support program stipend of $1,228.  It’s not enough.  “We have about $59 to buy groceries in a month because our home, we have to have housing insurance.  Rent. Hydro is high. Gas is high,” she says.

Solution?  Call the “Medical Assistance in Dying” hotline, of course, which will inform you that “you’ve reached the provincial health services authority telephone line for assistance in dying…”

They will provide doctors for her, she says.  “They can have me dead in 90 days.  That’s what I was told.”

Canada has a government so benevolent that it will care more for your needs that the United States government, say American progressives.  They’ll allow you free healthcare, and will grant you a pittance upon which you cannot live because the Canadian government’s environmental policies are driving up the price of necessities like energy, food, and water.  Then, when your misery exceeds your desire to live, it will also be kind enough to assist in the cost of your death.

That is the reality of the progressive, democratic utopia promising us nationalized healthcare.  A nation where government exists only to maintain its own power by any means necessary, rationing and distributing resources on behalf of the democratic majority that provides the mandate for government authority.  There’s no reason to think that our own government, crippled by debt, wouldn’t also craft very dark public healthcare policy prescriptions, like Canada, to curb healthcare costs. 

And since the few retired Gen Xers will be consuming wildly disproportionate healthcare resources and offer little to the coffers in twenty or so years, government may very easily convince the masses that, for the greater good of the collective and in the name of equity, Gen X should be ushered onward to the tranquil bliss of the next life. 

Maybe it will look something like Canada’s propaganda for assisted suicide to free up healthcare costs. “When I imagine my last days,” a speaker tells those being encouraged to willingly commit suicide, “I see bubbles. I see the ocean.  I see music… You just have to be brave enough to see it.”  Maybe it’ll be something like that, but at a much larger scale.

Of course, not all of us Gen Xers will want to die when that time comes, so maybe it’ll be more like the Carousel of the dystopian film Logan’s Run — only the Runners will be much slower, and America will certainly will be too broke by that time to allow for such grand production values.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License

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