Here's John Stossel going all transgressive on us with one of his subjects you're not even allowed to talk about:

America Needs to Do Less for Its Senior Citizens: Stossel reports when Medicare was created, senior citizens did not live as long, and medicine offered fewer wonderful but expensive treatments. Now Medicare is headed towards bankruptcy. Government has promised seniors $34 trillion dollars more than it has funded. It amounts to generational theft, says Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute. “The government spends around $6 on seniors for every dollar it spends on children, and yet the poverty rate among children is far higher than it is among seniors,” he says. Stossel confronts seniors about it. Some say, “we’ve paid our dues” and “every paycheck, money was deducted.” But in fact, today the average Medicare beneficiary collects two to three times more than they paid in. Why do even wealthy seniors feel entitled to have taxpayer-subsidized access to state of the art medical care?

I'm sure that my standard disclaimer that I don't want to get into a discussion about the merits of Medicare, that I'm really going somewhere else with this, will be ignored. Please consider the disclaimer nonetheless issued.

There are some pretty startling ideas asserted in the paragraph I quoted, and I'd like to deal with a few of the supporting arguments by way of getting to the real problem. Let's begin with that final question:

Why do even wealthy seniors feel entitled to have taxpayer-subsidized access to state of the art medical care?

Well, gosh. That is a stumper, now isn't it? But maybe it's because under the system as it currently exists they are entitled to that care? (Isn't that why they call them "entitlements?") If one believes that strict means-testing should be applied to Medicare payouts and that there should be severe caps on how much gets spent, then one really ought to say that. Painting people as villains because they take advantage of coverage that they've paid into and that -- hey, at least in the technical sense -- they are entitled to seems an odd choice.

But there's a reason for putting these folks in the position of the bad guy, as we'll see.

Working our way back, we come to this:

The government spends around $6 on seniors for every dollar it spends on children, and yet the poverty rate among children is far higher than it is among seniors...

There's a simple explanation for why government spends so much more on seniors than on children, and no, I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that seniors have a powerful political lobby and that "no one will speak for the children." I'll get to that explanation in a minute. But first, please don't misunderstand me. I'm not arguing in favor of this 6:1 ratio, nor am I saying there should be a different ratio. I offer no opinion on how much or how little the government should spend on either seniors or children. I merely note that we get a somewhat broader vilification here than in the previous quote. It isn't just mean old rich people helping themselves to government services they shouldn't feel "entitled" to, its old people in general greedily taking dibs on big piles of money that probably otherwise would have gone to buying shiny red bicycles for neglected poor kids.

Okay, so the reason that we spend so much on seniors is that seniors are the people who do most of the dying in our population, and dying is an expensive proposition when you're (pardon the expression) dead-set against it.

The U.S. statistics are based on aging Medicare patients who account for about 70 percent of all deaths each year. Five percent of all Medicare patients die per year and spend almost 30 percent ($143 billion in 2009) of the Medicare budget. Medicare patients who die spend about six times more in their last year of life than those who do not, which comes to about $25,000 for each person who dies, compared with the almost $4,000 spent per year for those Medicare patients who do not die.

Sadly, even those Medicare patients who don't spend the last six months of their lives in a given year are queuing up to do so eventually. There is apparently no getting around it. The long, slow, painful decline of the human body costs a bundle. Kids just aren't that expensive by comparison. And once again, I take no position on whether more money should be spent on children and less on seniors. I simply point at that the educational, nutritional, and housing expenses of poor kids are a bargain compared to what it costs to keep dying people alive a little while longer. So comparing the number of dollars spent on one versus the other is apples and oranges.

In any case, this long process of death need not be so expensive. We could just accept death rather than trying to fend it off. That's what Stossel is apparently arguing for. Just find people who are in the most expensive phase -- that last six months, say -- and tell them that if they can afford treatment by some other means, okay. But otherwise they're on their own. Medicare can't afford to cover them. It sounds harsh, but look: they're in their last six months anyway. We're really doing them a favor by not prolonging their agony, right?

To be fair, Stossel doesn't come right out and say that. He just says this:

America Needs to Do Less for Its Senior Citizens

So, per my comments above, we might put in strict means tests and caps on coverage. But ultimately, whether you call it "means testing" or "caps on coverage" or just "doing less," somebody doesn't get covered for something. And the logical place to start making cuts would be where the expenses are greatest and the ability to do any good would be the least, right? So that puts us right back in the last six months.

Well, here's the problem with "the last six months."

My father, now age 76, went through series of long and difficult cancer treatments last year. Right now he's doing quite well, but there was a time when things were looking pretty bleak. Around this time last year he might well have been pegged as someone in the final six months of his life. And then, with treatments cut off, he actually would have been.

But he is alive today. He met his new granddaughter last month and, for all we know, he'll be at her high school graduation.

With that in mind, I think it's important to restate Stossel's argument as follows:

America Needs to Let More of Its Senior Citizens Die

That's the ultimate meaning of "do less for our senior citizens." Of course, I doubt ABC would have allowed him to run his 20/20 segment if he had come out and sad that.

Does Stossel have a point? Should we be letting more of our senior citizens die? After all, there is the issue of that 34 trillion dollars mentioned above. (Some recent math I've done -- see comments -- informs me that that's enough money to give a million dollars to each of 34 million people. It's a lot of money, in other words.) Am I suggesting that all other considerations need to be put aside so that we can pay for every possible heroic medical intervention on behalf of terminal seniors?

I am not.

One of my favorite ideas about the future, and one of the most controversial ideas that we talk about here at The Speculist, is the notion that humanity might actually be improving morally. There is some evidence to suggest this might be the case, while (obviously) evidence that people are no damn good remains all too readily available. Putting the latter aside for a moment, it's been observed that people living today are much less likely to die at the hands of their fellow human beings than they were in earlier stages of human history. Horrifying atrocities of the past century notwithstanding, most of humanity has taken a sharp turn away from cruelty towards and mistreatment of our fellow humans.

Why is this happening? The turning point in making humanity better occurs each time we find it possible to stop regarding some segment of humanity as the Other. And it is technology that opens up these new possibilities.

50,000 years ago, when we were 10 or 20 times more likely to die by way of homicide than we are today, human beings lived in small highly self-sufficient family clans. There could be friendly interactions with the clan a couple miles up the river, or the one that showed up on a nearby hilltop one morning, but ultimately they were all the Other. The Other was a threat and needed to be treated as such in order for "humanity" -- that is, the clan -- to survive. Each group of a couple dozen or so people was essentially at war with the entire rest of the human race.

Then agriculture came along, opening up new possibilities. Human beings could now begin to see themselves as part of communities and eventually nations. The scope of the group with which we identified increased massively, from less than 30 to tens of thousands. The Other was still out there, in other communities and other nations, but interactions with these others were not as frequent. Life became more peaceful than it had been in the pre-agrarian past.

Let's jump ahead several thousand years.

In England, the end of the slave trade coincided with the dawn of the industrial revolution. The story of the Abolition movement that we're most familiar with tells us that public consciousness was raised by Enlightenment philosophy and Quaker activism. And that's true. But what set the stage for this awakening of the conscience? What made it all but inevitable? When machines began to provide a level of productivity that would never have been achieved via slave labor, England could afford to do the right thing. (That same basic conflict played out in a much more costly and tragic way 60 years later in the US Civil War fought between the industrialized Union and the agrarian slave-holding Confederacy.)

A pre-industrial society had fewer choices available to it than an industrial society. It saw fewer possibilities. It treated Africans as Others who were not truly human, but property to be used as needed, because there was no viable economic alternative. Industrialization presented the alternative and allowed English and then American society to hear the voices of conscience.

...continued at Speculist.com.