CodeBlueBlog: Senior Shame

April 2005

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The issue of seniors gambling in casinos needs further discussion.

The gambling industry spins senior gambling as a recreation. Casinos are portrayed as homey places where seniors can be entertained safely. The slots are vending machines from which the elderly purchase entertainment.

This image of gray bliss provided by benevolent pit bosses is a long way from reality. Ask anyone at gamblers anonymous.

No one plays the slots for entertainment. People play the machines because they want to win money. People are risking a percentage of their disposable cash in the hopes for a return.

If you dispute this, just read how much time and money the gambling industry spends on tweaking slot machines solely to take advantage of the true nature of this obsessive behavior. They know why people gamble on slots: the suckers think they can win money.

Medicare patients are not playing. They are not buying entertainment. They are not even gambling -- all slot machines are programed to return as little as 83 cents for every dollar played -- they are purely and simply throwing their money away. Burning it. The chances of a significant return (a big jackpot) are millions to one.

People who take money from entitlement programs for health care have no business throwing away cash. I'm sorry. This is a crime.

We scream and scream and whine over the cost of health care. We are squeezing our health care system to death in the name of reducing costs while the major recipients of that health care are flocking in droves to burn their cash in the impossible pursuit of a big payoff.

How much money are we flushing down this toilet? Read this from The New York Times:

Nearly 40 million Americans played a slot machine in 2003, according to an annual survey of casino gambling conducted by Harrah's Entertainment. Every day in the United States, slot machines take in, on average, more than $1 billion in wagers. Most of that money will be paid back to players, but so great is the ''hold'' from slot machines that collectively the games gross more annually than McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King and Starbucks combined. All told, North American casinos took in $30 billion from slots in 2003 -- an amount that dwarfs the $9 billion in tickets sold in North American movie theaters that year. Pornography, the country's second most lucrative form of adult entertainment, doesn't come close, either: experts estimate that Americans spend at most $10 billion a year on live sex shows, phone sex and porn in various media from cable to DVD to video and the Internet

We need a grassroots public policy program to shame these seniors out of this vile, wasteful practice.

Or we need to finally put the liability lawyers in touch with a worthwhile class action suit (International Game Technology, the major slots manufacturer, makes no bones about purposely creating addictive products).

Or we need to take 50% of every dollar in taxes out of those slot machines to subsidize Medicare.

I am going to start a letter writing campaign to tax slot machines for healthcare. Stay tuned.

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CodeBlueBlog

health care also health·care (hlthkâr) n. :efforts made to maintain or restore health especially by trained and licensed professionals -- usually hyphenated when used attributively

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	Webster's Online Dictionary The Rosetta Edition™
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