How important is it to the USA to take care of its elderly compared to other civilized nations?

for example, making sure that anyone who is old and cant work who gets ill gets all the treatment they need regardless of their finances, and all their medicine they need etc..


on a scale of top priority, reasonable priority, average priority, low priority....

where would you place the USA?

In the EU15, about 19% of the elderly population is considered "at risk" of poverty. The poverty threshold is 60% of median income in the EU.

In the US, the median income of the elderly was 14,400 USD per year, while median income for the entire population was over 40,000. Applying the EU definition, that means that well over 50% of the elderly in the US are "at risk of poverty". From the distributions in the paper cited below (from census data), 60% of the US elderly had an income below 18,000 USD. So one can estimate that between 60 and 80% of the elderly in the US would be deemed "at risk" in the EU.

Needless to say, the US does not use the same definitions of poverty. The poverty threshold is very low, which means that even above the poverty threshold people live in significantly substandard conditions in terms of housing, food security and access to health and education. Recently there has been some work done on changing the assessment of poverty by introducing a spectrum of economic wellbeing. This adds the "economically vulnerable" population. Over 40% of the elderly fall in the economically in crisis or economically vulnerable categories.

I do not think we treat our elderly as well as we should. But I place blame on the families of the elderly. In regards to health care, our elderly get all the treatment they need and in this regards we are at the top. Statistics show that the largest percentage of Health care dollars go to end of life treatments.

Why don't people take care of their families any more? My issue is this. I'm 42 years old. They yank 15% of my paycheck to pay for the "promise" we gave to the seniors. I made no such promise. The promise was made 30 years before I was even born.
What promise do they give me? I'll tell you. I can remember my social studies teacher in 7th grade, back in 1979, telling me that I was going to get screwed on Social Security. All my life they keep telling me of the looming problem, that it's going to be bankrupt, that I will get nothing. You better make other plans. What the hell kind of "promise" is that to hand to my generation?
Either fix it or let me opt out and keep my money. If I stuck that 15% in a 401k I could live like a king when I retire. The whole program needs to be scrapped, in my opinion. From my perspective it's fundamentally unfair, and it's my number one issue when I vote. I don't want to hear a 55 year old democrat congressman call privatization, a "risky scheme" and how there is no crisis, and with a straight face tell me it's solvent until 2020. Like that is a lifetime away.

The answer depends upon what country we are comparing the United States to. Actually we probably fall in the average area. Being a Senior Citizen, I may be a little more aware of both the good and bad areas. We are not cast adrift on an ice floe, in the Eskimo tradition nor are we venerated, as the Chinese do. We fall somewhere in the middle.