The Baby Boomers Retirement Blog

Québec’s new health care fee is just a small example of the price we have to pay for longevity and aging population.

Let me explain this. The fee itself at $25 for 2010 and even increasing to $200 through the years is not something that would ruin any person’s finances (and, according to critics, it won’t even fix the system…).

However, it is a sign showing the problem with the health care system(s) devised decades ago, when the life expectancy was less than today. At that time retirees used to live approx. ten years after retirement. Or even less.

Nowadays people live 20-25 years after retirement. We live longer and longer… and according to the statistics the life expectancy is getting higher and higher in all the developed countries. Having a long life seems to be a nice thing in itself – although there is a “little” problem. The human body is no different than your car. The older your car is the more you visit your mechanic. You need to fix a small thing here and another one there, you need to replace a part today, another one tomorrow and so on. The same with our aging bodies. It requires more and more care. Health care. And as everything else, the health care is getting more and more expensive.

So, how do we deal with the ever increasing health care expenses? More taxes? We already pay very high taxes. The next question is is: is there enough active earners to be taxed? Because that’s the huge problem of the aging population: there are more people in retirement than active workers who can be taxed and heavily hit with fees!

Face it, this is another problem created by the Baby Boomers. They (we?) had a wonderful life and enjoyed all the benefits of the systems set up by our predecessors. But we didn’t make enough children to reproduce ourselves. We’ve never thought about the days when we all be retired and all of us want to benefit of the pension system and health care. We’ve never though and didn’t want to think about the simple question – who will put money into those systems if there are less people coming after us? (thanks to our selfish lifestyle and ideology…)

The $25/years sounds like peanuts. Even if all the left leaning chattering classes cry “not fair”. Unfortunately, it’s just a desperate attempt to patch the system. The system needs an overhaul, though.

Do you agree?