(CBS) WASHINGTON - The coming year is a big one for President George W. Bush, President Clinton and for millions of others born in 1946, the start of the post-war baby boom.
They're turning 65.
That makes them eligible for Medicare, with huge implications for our future, CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports.
On New Year's Day, the first baby boomers will celebrate the big 6-5, and they're not just getting older. They're getting more costly.
"Boomers" are the 77 million Americans born from 1946 through '64. Beginning Jan. 1, 10,000 a day will turn 65. That will continue for the next 19 years.
"The retirement of the baby boom generation will bring a tsunami of spending that will cause a severe problem for the federal government's budget over time," said David Walker, former U.S. comptroller general and CEO of the Comeback America Initiative.
Take Medicare, health care for the elderly and disabled:
• The number of people eligible will nearly double from 46 million to 80 million by the time all the boomers reach 65.
• It's estimated the cost will grow from $500 billion a year today to $929 billion by 2020.
• The number of workers supporting each senior will fall.
"Ultimately we're going to have to make tough choices about how much health care can we afford and sustain and how are we going to change our payment systems to make sure that it doesn't bankrupt the country," said Walker. "Because if there's one thing that could bankrupt the United States, it's out-of-control health care costs."
Medicare is already underfunded by at least $23 trillion. That's the difference between the benefits promised and the taxes actually being paid into Medicare. It could go bankrupt as early as 2017. Yet Americans still, apparently, want it all. According to a new Associated Press/GfK poll, they don't want to raise the age for Medicare.
Sixty-one percent favor raising Medicare taxes to avoid cutting Medicare benefits, and a majority of both Democrats and Republicans, young and old, would rather raise taxes than cut benefits.
The health care town hall meetings gave a glimpse into how Americans react when they think their benefits might be cut.
To save the system, fiscal watchdogs insist Americans will ultimately have to work longer and get used to less government help. The question is not if change will have to be made but when politicians choose to make them.
NY Post - More Union Bull.
These garbage men really stink.
Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts -- a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.
Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.
"They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important," said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.
Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department -- and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan -- at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.
The snitches "didn't want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation," Halloran said. "They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file."
New York's Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process -- and pad overtime checks -- which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.
The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.
They said crews normally would have been more aggressive in com bating a fierce, fast-moving bliz zard like the one that barreled in on Sunday and blew out the next morning.
The workers said the work slowdown was the result of growing hostility between the mayor and the workers responsible for clearing the snow.
In the last two years, the agency's workforce has been slashed by 400 trash haulers and supervisors -- down from 6,300 -- because of the city's budget crisis. And, effective tomorrow, 100 department supervisors are to be demoted and their salaries slashed as an added cost-saving move.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/sanit_filthy_snow_slow_mo_qH57MZwC53QKOJlekSSDJK#ixzz19eT6HOyN
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