Buy every retiree a high-performance motor cycle. They'll have some fun, and when they die you won't need expensive end-of-life care; you'll just need a mop and a body-bag. It'll save billions.
"I love the movies, love ‘em. Now, I’m watching Terminator 2 the other day, and I’m thinking to myself: They cannot top the stunts in this film, they cannot top this shit, unless … they start using terminally ill people as stunt people in feature films … well, hear me out, ’cause I know to a lot of you this may seem a little cruel. “Aww, Bill, terminally ill stunt people? That’s cruel!” You know what I think’s cruel? Leaving your loved ones to die in a hospital room surrounded by strangers. Fuck that! Put ‘em in the movies! What, you wanna let your grandmother live out her last days in a sterile hospital room, with translucent skin so thin you can see her last heartbeat work its way down her blue veins? Or do you want her to meet… Chuck Norris?
Hey, how come you dressed my grandmother up as a mugger? Shut up and get off the set. Action! Push her towards Chuck! (Karate noises) Wow, he kicked her head right off her body! Did you see that? Did you see my Grammy? She's out of her misery, you've seen the greatest film of all time!"
It is an amortized cost. The NYT claims Medicare costs the government roughly $6,000/person/year. So the question is whether the motorcycles reduce an average of 3 years of life per person. (Ignoring price shocks from giving them out.)
But... 2015 data says ~5,000 cyclists died out of a total population of 8,600,000, making for .05% of cyclists dying per year. Assuming a grant at 65 and a life expectancy of 85, that's an average of .01 years of life lost in the first year. (And this assumes everyone rides them as much as people who choose to buy motorcycles!) The years lost decline as people age, of course, but even raw multiplication only gets us an average of .2 years of life lost per person over the course of the project.
Obviously this doesn't adjust for varying risk profiles compared to normal motorcycle riders, but we'd be talking about being more than 15 times as likely to die as most motorcyclists to make this math add up.
All moral issues aside, it looks like the math just doesn't back this one.
But you don't need to buy a new bike for every senior every year. Bikes last. In steady state, you only need to buy one for whoever retires that year, which is maybe 3 million per year. So the cost is roughly $45 billion per year, and that's assuming all retirees participate.
As for cost, I expect mass production on a vast scale would ultimately drive the price down. Every damn vehicle manufacturer is going to want a piece of the GLR* contract. They'll knife each other in the streets for it. $10K per unit seems like a workable target.
[*] Let me just say, in my official capacity, that the initials do not stand for Granny's Last Ride. They stand for, uh, something else.
That's a really high price for a bike, you're talking a small percentage top of the line or stupid over-priced for name brand sake bikes there. Kinda feels like you might have backed in to that number?
For reference, a bike like a GSXR 600 or Ducati Monster can be had for under $10k - and one would assume a decent discount for buying a few million at a time ;-)
In a rational world, demand for 10s of millions of bikes could easily be absorbed by the asian supply chain over teh course of a few years. What would likely happen though is the the contracts for them would go to a US company that sells the bikes for 10x the price and can't deliver them on time.
Yeah, you all are being ridiculous. No need for tens of millions of motor cycles. Just get one and pass it around. The whole point here is that the owner won't be spending decades putting around the country!!!!!!
