Seniors Complain Loudest, Benefit Most From Public Health Care

And yet, on our televisions we see enraged senior citizens at health care town halls with signs warning about the rise of socialism in America. That is, the group most worried about government intervention into health care is the group that benefits from the greatest government investment in public health care the planet has ever witnessed. Are you kidding me?

Prior to the government's redistributive investments in Social Security and Medicare, poverty and illness made for a brutal end-of-life experience for millions of seniors. According the National Bureau of Economic Research, "a large increase in the incomes of the elderly stemming from pre-Social Security social programs and the phase-in of the Social Security system has coincided with suicide rates for that group dropping 56 percent since 1930."

Yet we have to listen to knuckleheads like Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, scaring seniors with bogus warnings about the government creating "death panels." But before Social Security and Medicare, the sad truth is that many seniors issued what we might call self-imposed death panel verdicts: They took their own lives.

I don't remember this many seniors complaining about socialism during the past four decades, a period during which the poverty rate among seniors was reduced to a third of what it was, Medicare and Medicaid expanded drastically, and Mr. Obama's Republican predecessor in the White House pushed through an expensive prescription drug benefit - in short, an era that witnessed a giant, "socialist" transfer of cash from younger Americans to their parents and grandparents, some of whom are now complaining about a too-big government.

Thomas F. Schaller teaches political science at UMBC. His column appears regularly in The Baltimore Sun. His e-mail is [e-mail].