Investing

Are Old People Bankrupting America?

From The Atlantic Wire, By Max Fisher As health care costs balloon, swelling the budget and the deficit, elderly Americans are consistently the biggest consumers. This isn’t their fault. They simply require more–and more expensive–treatments. These treatments are billed to…

By Douglas A. McIntyre

Published February 3, 2010, 11:43am ET · 1 min read

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From The Atlantic Wire, By Max Fisher

As health care costs balloon, swelling the budget and the deficit, elderly Americans are consistently the biggest consumers. This isn’t their fault. They simply require more–and more expensive–treatments. These treatments are billed to Medicare, which hands the bill to the federal government, which needs tax revenue to pay it.

Here’s the problem: those same elderly Americans are outraged at the rising tax rate and growing federal spending. Seniors are using their tremendous political weight to push a conflicting agenda, expanding services to seniors while reducing the taxes need to pay for them.

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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