A diversion from
the usual -- motivated by a recent conversation about the Baby Boomers:
that displaced bulge in the population who have distorted society since they overran
the nurseries of the Eisenhower years.
For this group,
“joint” and “hip” once invoked a sub-culture of beads and bell-bottoms -- now
associated more with “replacement” and “physical therapy.” Drugs of choice are
no longer recreational, but regulate their HDL and systolic blood pressure. The
numbers now threaten to swamp the delivery of elderly care, health insurance
and retirement security.
The context was a
nightmarish encounter with the bungled processing by an over-burdened bureaucracy
of an application for Medicare – the triply oxymoronic American “health
insurance program” that provides the age-advanced with no less than four
inter-locking forms of coverage – for hospitals, doctors and drugs, along with
an opaque and effectively non-optional layer of “supplemental coverage” that fills
in the gaps in the other three.
On reflection, the
concept of “supplements” seemed thematic. Unsatisfied with historically
normative levels of entitlement, the Baby Boomers have invented, demanded and
consumed whole categories of newly-identified goods and services – an influence
evidently to continue until the long-denied arrival of their generational demise.
Consider their
pervasive impact across the culture:
As noted,
individual enrolment in long-term and other in-fill health insurance overage is
a strategically vital supplement, because available health plans are
insufficient to protect against the devastation of a catastrophic illness.
With the erosion of
social security and the depleting of their under-funded savings and pension
plans, the Boomers are staying at work post-retirement – consulting or teaching
or hosting at Wal-Marts – to supplement income levels no longer deemed adequate
to underwrite the mega-house or the bass boat behind the truck.
In the schools, the
Boomers’ privileged offspring – each already classified on demand as gifted and
above-average – subscribe to supplemental tutoring, test preparation and
counseling as they strive to game the systems of university admission.
More youthful
populist hostility to the diversion of taxpayer bail-out funds be damned, whole
business sectors depend on the availability of salary supplements – bonuses
being deemed vital to the compensation plans of banks and investment funds.
In the pharmacies,
what were once the accepted signals of advancing maturity are now attacked by
supplements ranging from age-targeted vitamins and synthetic hormones to
Rogaine and Viagra.
While in front of
the bathroom mirror, the previously unexceptional effects of time and gravity
are defied by supplements delivered by tube and jar, scalpel and needle.
Contours and visages are re-sculpted by augmentation or reduction, and the
percentage of authentic body parts becomes inverse to the seniority revealed by
the calendar.
Profound conclusions
from these symptoms may be elusive, but strategies do emerge:
- ·
Clearly,
any politician who gets in the way of the Baby Boomers’ voracious appetites for
supplements of all sorts will be trampled and left for road kill under the government-provided
walkers and wheel chairs.
- ·
On the
other hand, lobbyists will prosper who line up in favor of legislative
proposals for the extension of benefits of all varieties.
- ·
And
investors might expect to be smartly rewarded for adding to their portfolios
the makers of titanium knee joints, D-cup gel inserts and implants for
hairlines, lips and cheekbones.
While “rock on” no
longer refers to Woodstock or the summer of love, but to the nap-inducing
motion of a chair on the porch.
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