For the last thirty years of her life, after my father had died, my mother lived mostly in Newark, New Jersey public housing which is just about as glamorous as it sounds.

Once we came of age, my three siblings and I tried to persuade her to move, even bribe her, but she wouldn't hear of it. Like many a modern senior, she did not want to be beholden to kids whose snot she once wiped and diapers she once changed.

Each day, at the project where she lived, Resorts or Harrahs or Trump's Taj Mahal would park
a gaudy double decker bus to seduce seniors the way ice cream trucks of our youth seduced us. And each day scores of little old ladies would pile on with their buckets of quarters and head on down to Atlantic City.
My mother held this whole experience in contempt. It's not that she was opposed to gambling. She was just opposed to Atlantic City. She thought it infra dignitatem, infra dig - for those of you who slept through Latin 101, "beneath one's dignity" - a bizarro world of unseemly hype chock a-block with little old ladies from Newark housing projects quite unlike her royal self. Instead, my mother saved her quarters and headed out to Vegas at least a few times a year. Now, that was class.

When she died, a few years back, my siblings and I divvied up the loot. I came away with the answering machine and the poker chips and figured I had done well to get these, particularly the latter. But we had underestimated my mother. It turns out that despite her seeming poverty and her eighth grade education, she had managed to accumulate a tidy little estate of $160,000. In this, she is hardly unique. Like most seniors, especially those reared during the Depression, she had learned to do something that has long eluded the government: balance the budget.
In 1997, Washington took a stab at the same, and Kansas City-area hospitals are still reeling from the blow. As explained in this issue, Medicare is one of the two governmental greased pigs that make budget balancing somewhat slippery, Social Security being the other. Today, Medicare costs the US taxpayer more than $200 billion a year and accounts for about 13% of the entire federal budget.

By the year 2010, Medicare will be running projected deficits of about $150 billion a year, and only then do the baby boomers start kicking back and demanding their fat old slice of the pork. Scarier still, if the life sciences research we talk about in this issue works as well as we hope, grandma will be trading in her walker for a new mountain bike, and we'll be paying for her skinned knees and the Section 8 voucher on her new condo in Vail until she's 100. We're just not quite sure how we'll be paying.

In 1997, to save Medicare money, Washington did what it's been doing for the quarter of a century: it decided to pay the hospitals and the docs a little less. The fact that, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Committee, the government's Medicare fees only cover about 70% of current costs didn't seem to trouble anyone a whole bunch. Why should it? The logic is pretty simple: there are a lot more Medicare recipients who vote than hospital administrators.

Another curious feature of The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 was its quiet ban on private contracting, one that effectively prohibits seniors from spending their own money to buy health care. As the law works, doctors and hospitals who contract privately with Medicare beneficiaries for Medicare-covered services will be banned from providing Medicare services for two years - which means essentially that they will be put out of business.

Apparently, someone thought this was a good idea. The fact that it prevents retirees from acquiring critical care or that it spends Medicare money on care seniors would be willing to pay for themselves did not seem to factor in to the final equation.

The budget act gets curioser and curioser. Its highlight has to be the Home Care Shuffle, the kind of shell game that would get a street hustler busted in Times Square. As it works, the change will shift about $20 or
so billion per year in home care costs from Medicare Part A, hospital insurance, to Medicare Part B, sup-
plemental medical insurance. Part A is financed by the very finite payroll tax. Part B is financed largely by general revenue which is about as hard and fast as silly putty. With a quick diversion of attention and a little sleight of hand, presto, the Medicare crisis is diverted to another day.

On the campaign trail, candidates troll for additional votes not by offering serious reform but by promising to burden Medicare even more with prescription drug costs. By the time November rolls around, the media will have convinced us that to finance their life-saving wonder pills, all Grandmas except our own, are busy fighting Fido for those last morsels of Gravy Train. And then, if the media have their way, we'll vote to empower the government a little more and bankrupt it while we do so.

Truth be told, I know these apocryphal dog-food eaters, the "poorest of the poor," a little better than most middle class Americans. I grew up with them. They don't queue up for the Atlantic city busses because they're too stupid to take care of themselves. They do it because government policy towards them has been largely of the "bread and circuses" school: regardless of what they do, they know they'll be taken care of. In fact, this is the first generation in human history encouraged to worry more about themselves than about their children and grandchildren, and too many have succumbed to that encouragement.

Those seniors who live prudently as my mother did - a prudence that still allows for the occasional Vegas junket - usually acquire a fair chunk of change. Their grandchildren may not have that luxury.
The solution is obvious to most thinking people: return the responsibility for medical savings and investment savings to the individual. The problem is that thinking people may no longer make up 50.1% of the electorate. We'll see in November.

The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.