Medicare or Not?

Government and society are continuous enterprises, with obligations and benefits shared by multiple generations. Should the generation that undertook the financing and construction of the Interstate Highway system have some special benefit from it or exclusivity to it because their expense in building it is greater than the present generation's per capita cost of maintaining it? Medicare is a benefit that is supposed to be perpetual, built on the assumption that there is or should be enough prosperity to afford some measure of health security to present and future Americans.

The typical attack against Medicare is the hint or suggestion of "socialism", as if the very word or concept is some toxic mist from a miasmal swamp of civil evil. Like everything, Medicare costs money, but it appears Americans, granted freedom by nature or nature's God, have established a 'people's priority' of mutuality of social welfare, to retain some portion of societal wealth that 'government' otherwise feels compelled to waste in militarism and imperialism. Why is the welfare of the people and not the waste of war always secondary in the opinions of amateur economists and sociologists, when it is hardly arguable which pursuit produces the most social and financial detriment?

Since there isn't any historical evidence that the world of unfettered capitalism, a hundred years ago, was a superior or preferable environment for the poor or elderly, we must account the newer elements in the social order, unions, collective bargaining, Social Security, and Medicare in some degree responsible for the qualitative improvement in the standard of living of those classes of people who would have had much bleaker prospects under the past socio-economic formula. A pertinent statement by Rudi Nussbaum highlights the socio-economic myopia and rote ideology of our amateur economists and sociologists. "Following a tradition illustrated nearly 400 years ago by Gallileo's fate, accepted beliefs and supporting theoretical models, combined with vested interests, trumped observation". It did, and it does.