Would-be Medicare reformers regularly emphasize the fact that population aging is expected to put severe stress on the Medicare budget over the coming decades. So familiar are the statistics on aging baby boomers that it is often lost on Americans that many other industrialized nations face even more dire predicaments. For example, while nearly 17 percent of U.S. citizens are expected to be over age sixty-five by the year 2020, Japan has already surpassed this figure and expects a staggering one-fourth of its population to be over age sixty-five in twenty years. U.S. policymakers should take heart that other nations have already been down this road, and, as in the case of Japan, are even aggressively attacking the problem.