Need health savings? Try environmental justice.

As far as the massive budget deficit is concerned, both tax rises and budget cuts will be needed to solve the problem. There will be a budgetary crisis when the baby boom enters the Medicare and Social Security programs. The current budget deficit won't go away without significant economic growth, which probably isn't going to happen anytime soon. In Republican Congressman Paul Ryan's Roadmap for America's Future, which has been cited as a conservative answer to the deficit, entitlement cuts are proposed. The problem is: we need these programs. But we also need to reduce the deficit. How should the government go about doing it?

The answer is cost reduction in these programs. Nobody can really contain the costs of Social Security without increasing taxes. The elderly will always need money to live and there is no way we can decrease their level of spending without subsequent reductions in quality of life. So that leaves us with Medicaid and Medicare.

Medicaid and Medicare are both public health programs, which make them easy to reduce the cost of. To reduce the cost of a public health insurance program, all you have to do is make people healthier. With Medicare, this would involve a general improvement in public health. The elderly live in the same places and live in the same lifestyles as most other Americans, therefore they cannot be singled out so easily. People on Medicaid rolls, however are the easiest targets of them all. They are all impoverished, often African American or Latino, and often live very unhealthy lives.

These people should be the focus of public health programs that focus on nutrition, hazardous waste cleanup, and air pollution control. Their health-care is directly sponsored by the government therefore improving their environmental condition should be the first consideration when trying to reduce costs. Instead of cutting health care for these people, lets remove steel mills and power plants from inner city neighborhoods. Lets clean up polluted industrial sites that are now low-income neighborhoods. After we have done this, we will have reduced the low-income demand for Medicaid and improved their lives at the same time.