Will we ever see meaningful entitlement reform in the United States?

I don't think that the current elderly are going to be a problem with entitlement reform; further persons that will retire at their normal retirement age for the next five to ten years may not be a problem either, as most plans that I have seen protect this group from change. So the question is really what will persons presently 60 and under understand about the restrictions needed on their benefits so that the country can afford to pay them.

In order to ask this group to sacrifice benefits, such as increasing the retirement age by a number of years, the government needs to slim down as much as possible and demonstrate to this generation that despite all it can do, there is still a huge gap and failure to act is in fact worse than acting. The solutions are clear in the large but not in the details; by that I mean that everyone knows that the retirement age must be raised, but can argue over the details. With respect to Medicare, a combination of additional taxes, fraud prevention along with some rationing of care based on outcomes will be needed to slim down spending by a substantial amount. I suspect that the resistance to Medicare reform may come more from providers than recipients themselves as these are the folks that will receive less money from providing the care. In the case of Medicare reform, the complex details leave much to argue about.