Walk into any casino anywhere in the United States and you’ll see that 80% of the people standing in front of slot machines are senior citizens. One study in Michigan estimated that as many as 65% of all seniors there had gambled. Slot machines, analyzed as a whole, simply take money for the privilege of watching cherries spin and stop on a screen. That’s it. And slots take anywhere from one cent to 17 cents on every dollar they receive. They never can lose (see the law of large numbers) and therefore, as a whole, there is a constant, never-changing progressive dollar deficit accruing to the senior population that plays.
Medicare and Social Security patients flock to casinos in droves and burn hundreds of billions of dollars in this profligate pursuit.
Now, I don’t care what people decide to do with their money. If they want to gather it up into a campfire and watch it burn, that’s fine. But I do care what people decide to do with my money. Social Security and Medicare comes out of the working taxpayer’s pocket. It is, by now, elucidated many times that the system is not a retirement fund that spends money accrued by the senior in his lifetime. It is a transfer of dollars from taxpayer to senior. And in many cases, the last stop of that dollar is in some casino owner’s pocket.
Seniors are screaming about the inequities of drug prices between Canada and the United States. This despite the fact that 70 percent of Medicare beneficiaries spent less than $500 from their own pockets for prescriptions last year. Certain lawmakers, pandering to the gray lobby, are trying to allow these gamblers the ability to circumvent our system and buy their drugs on the cheap, across the border.
However, the dirty little secret that we all ignore is that our drug prices are higher because we can afford to pay them, and built into the higher cost of our drugs is the cost of research to develop new drugs. Frank Lichtenberg of the Columbia Business School predicts that allowing Americans access to cheaper Canadian drugs would result in “a reduction in future drug development, which would not be a good thing for future generations.”
Either seniors must be prohibited from transferring our tax dollars to casino owners; or, Medicare – including prescription drug coverage -- must be sternly means-tested. If we cannot restrict seniors from throwing away dollars, at least let us force them to economically triage a set amount of dollars to be spent on drugs or cherries. With 70 million baby boomers coming down the pike we’d better act now before the next generation of profligate geezers leverages their retired clout to completely bankrupt the entitlement system and any research or industry that stands in the way of their fun.
