Opinion

Medicare’s Hidden Fertility Problem

We’re producing too few workers to support more retirees, living longer. The demographic trap has sprung on pay-as-you-go taxation.
Medicare’s Hidden Fertility Problem
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Richard Menger
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Commentary

Medicare is not merely a senior health program; it is an elaborate intergenerational contract with a hidden clause: it quietly runs on a tax structure that is dependent on the birth rates among current workers. And that structure is crumbling.

Richard Menger
Richard Menger
Author
Richard P. Menger, MD, MPA, is an academic neurosurgeon and a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is currently the chief of complex spine surgery at the University of South Alabama and the lead editor of the textbook “The Business, Policy, and Economics of Neurosurgery.”