Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens says he must “fish or cut bait.”
Fishing, we take it, means staying a while longer on the nation’s highest court. The alternative is to retire.
“The president and the Senate need plenty of time to fill a vacancy,” he observed, leading some to expect a retirement announcement soon.
Justice Stevens is 89. But he played tennis on the day he gave reporters an interview, so must be in pretty fair physical condition. He still considers himself able mentally to do the job — a job he enjoys immensely.
A look at the obituaries in any Sunday Kansas City Star makes it easier to understand why Justice Stevens remains on the high court bench at the cusp of 90: the age of the newly dead keeps rising. We live longer; stay active longer; stay able longer.
Still, Justice Stevens wisely understands that 89 is old; that he is un-likely to be immortal and that he should hedge his bets so that he can retire on his own terms — and then write a bit about the court and his 35 years of experience on it before the reaper swings his scythe.
And that brings up Sarah Palin and her death panels.
There were no death panels in the health care bill, of course. Palin was merely shilling for the bill’s more hysterical critics. Nobody is really going to tell grandma and grandpa that they must shuffle off this mortal coil to cut health care costs.
But health care statistics continue to prove that, as Americans and the rest of the world’s peoples get grayer and grayer, health care costs grow higher and higher.
As if to demonstrate that proposition, last week’s segment-by-segment analysis of the economy showed that employment by the health care industry grew throughout the recession — and continues to climb.
Don’t blame Justice Stevens. He only complains that his tennis game is “not as strong” as it was and that he has a touch of arthritis in a knee. A good many other 89-year-olds aren’t as fortunate. They and the rest of the senior set require more and more health care as their numbers grow.
And seniors like Justice Stevens, who are multiplying in number at least as fast as are those who need care, should prompt widespread and profound changes in the workplace and throughout society.
Supreme Court justices have jobs for life; most others face mandatory retirement at 65. Few can stay on to 70. And a growing number of retirees discover they have outlived their savings; that the retirement they thought was secure is anything but: Living on a Social Security pension check is living in poverty.
OUR SOCIETY has answers to parts of this problem: Medicare provides for most of the health care those over 65 require. Medicaid covers nursing home and assisted living care for the elderly poor after they have stripped themselves of assets. Most of the truly helpless are cared for. And that’s about where help stops.
When we become older than society expects us to continue to work for wages, full time or part time, our standard of living falls to what pensions, accumulated wealth and family assistance provides. In a growing percentage of cases, that combination of assets is so meager that grinding poverty en-sues.
When this aging of society gets more pronounced and the need glares at us and screams for remedy, remedies will be invented and put in place. More subsidized housing will be built; the economy will broaden and jobs tailored for able men and women in the over-70 set will be created, so that one needn’t be self-employed or a high court judge in order to stay at work for years past any arbitrary retirement age.
These accommodations will be made when they must be made, just as other grief-causing crises in our past grab-bed our society by the scruff of the neck and forced the creation of Social Security, Medi-care, Medicaid and public housing.
It would be better, however, to look at what’s coming down the road, allocate the resources, meet the needs before they become crises and prevent some of the misery from ever happening.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
