Collision Course for Science and Government
Science and government are on a collision course and it has nothing to do with COVID. Let’s put some facts together and see what it is.
Six out of ten Americans do not have enough savings to cover a $1,000 bill.
If we include unfunded Medicare and Social Security, our national debt is $141 trillion.
That means that currently, each American owes $428,000 or 25% of median lifetime earnings. As there are only about 30 million households that pay federal taxes, that’s $4.7 million per household.
There are many other expenses for each level of government as well as unplanned. expenditures such as wars, pandemics, and weather emergencies = each costing additional billions of dollars.
And then there is science:
Scientists are studying ways to extend the human lifespan hundreds of years.
Here’s another interesting statistic. Right now, 4 in 10 Americans believe in socialism. Socialism is defined as government ownership of the means of production. Medicare and Social Security are social programs run by the government and funded by taxpayers. I wonder what younger Americans taxpayers will think about paying for someone to get Social Security and medical care for, say, 100 years.
Obviously that won’t happen because, literally, as Margaret Thatcher once said, “eventually, you run out of other people’s money.” But, something will have to change. As Medicare runs out of money, which, like Social Security, it is projected to do, we will begin the arguments of when older people should be cut off from healthcare. In 2008, Daniel Callahan suggested in the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics that that would be somewhere in the range of 75 to 80.
Right now, we know that, genetics aside, “people live longer if they have a good diet, engage in regular exercise, are able to avoid disease, and if they are of a high socio-economic status.” That’s gotten us to where we are today, an average lifespan of over 78 years. But scientists have been exploring multiple ways to extend life spans dramatically. One drug, Metformin (discovered in the 1950s), is already on the market for diabetes (discovered in the 1950s), but drug trials for longevity are currently underway at FDA. Previous research has suggested that it may show increases in lifespan over ten years from all causes.
Last year, one scientist (a gerontologist) predicted that by 2037, we will enable the first big push that will allow people to live 20 to 30 years beyond the current average age. He went on to say that, once we do that, we will find new ways, like organ replacement, lengthening telomeres or genetic manipulation, to extend life for hundreds of years.
However, Medicare has been predicted to be bankrupt by 2026 and Social Security by 2034. There are lots of suggestions on what to do about this but none of these seem to be part of the discussion concerning current spending or increases in entitlements.
So, like a giant asteroid heading for earth, the science of longevity is about to smash into the politics of government and it’s going to happen quickly.