The story of Major League baseball manager Lou Piniella moving up his retirement is a touching one, but it has a message that is important as we consider the issue of healthcare in America.

Piniella had planned to retire as manager of the Chicago Cubs at the end of the season has he had reached his 66th birthday. But a personal issue meant that he would be needed at home. He realized it wasn’t fair to his family or his team to split time between the two. So he chose family, and stepped aside after the Cubs’ loss to Atlanta Sunday afternoon.

It’s not the way Piniella wanted to end his career in baseball. He played for 18 years in the Majors Leagues, and has managed for the past 23 years, winning a World Series at Cincinnati in 1990. But for Piniella, family comes first, and for that we should all admire the man.

But we all grew up in a society in which 65 was generally considered retirement age. That’s when the younger generation should contribute to taking care of you, and your contributions to the work force is no longer necessary.

It’s not the time when most of us expect to care for our parents.

But through the miracle of healthcare advances, people are living longer. But that also means that someone who retires at 65 could have as much as one-third of their life remaining. For the first time in the history of the world, it will no longer be uncommon for someone to reach retirement age and still live to see their own children reach retirement age.

That puts a tremendous financial burden on the generations to come, who will already be facing the financial burdens left to them by uncontrolled government spending that has racked up a federal debt that is unlikely to ever be paid off.

And healthcare is at an all-time high in cost. Drug companies who have developed pills that can help extend life expect to be financially rewarded for their research.

The most commonsense approach is to lower the quality of healthcare available. Life expectencies will lower, leaving less people needing healthcare. According to critics of the new national healthcare plan, that is one of the plan’s goals. But we’ve heard so much rhetoric about the plan, and very little facts, so we really do not take anything said about the plan by either supporters or critics to heart.

We need to look for ways to lower the cost of healthcare. In the meantime, we need to look for ways to keep people in the workforce longer, which means more jobs must be created.

Anybody who tells you that healthcare is a simple problem with a simple solution, simply does not understand the issue.