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Aging Baby Boomers a Health Care Issue The aging of America's vast baby boomer population will present many tough challenges for government and health care industry alike. Here, a look at some of the dilemmas that are increasingly being recognized and discussed.Much fuss has been made lately about the pressures baby boomers will place on national finances as they age. Over 76 million strong, the boomers already account for an increasingly large proportion of doctor's visits and treatment for such age-related illnesses as diabetes and arthritis. As they begin swelling the ranks of senior citizens, a major re-thinking and even overhauling of the current health care system may be in order. Some state governments have organized committees and started to hold conferences and hearings on the challenges presented by our aging population. Several months ago California, for example, held an informational meeting in Cupertino. With an eye to long-term issues and solutions, representatives of state government and the health care profession discussed how the state can evaluate its existing infrastructure for providing elder care. The oldest baby boomers are almost 60 years old, and senior health care is no longer a hazy abstraction for them. Many do not have long-term or catastrophic health insurance. Moreover, baby boomers on the whole have not saved money as diligently as their parents' generation did. This is justifiably worrying to many, since Medicare does not always cover care for chronic illnesses (requiring only "custodial" care), and patients do not normally qualify for Medicaid until they have exhausted their life savings. As medicines are developed to deal more and more effectively with a greater number of chronic conditions, there will also be an unprecedented number of people with disabilities living well into their senior years. Some have persuasively argued that baby boomers can mount a groundbreaking challenge to conventional images of aging and disabled people. Women face the biggest aging-related difficulties. More often widowed, they are two to three times more likely to face financial difficulties than men; they more often live alone; and on the whole, they have less access to health care. They are also more likely to be caregivers for spouses or older relatives, which raises another important issue related to baby boomer aging: who will provide care within families? Birth rates have fallen since the boomer generation and as a result, there will be a projected one-third drop in the number of informal family caregivers available by the year 2040. . Back To Mature Market News → Go To The GenerationTarget.com Mature Market Bookstore → |
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