Crisis Versus Opportunity

The ongoing aging of the US population is mirrored in many other countries, especially in Europe and parts of Asia. The most critical issue surrounds providing healthcare and related services to this burgeoning community, given a proportionately dwindling supply of caregivers and service providers, and a shrinking tax base.

By the time the biggest wave of the Baby Boom hits retirement, the ratio of potential caregivers and service providers to consumers of assistive services will be one quarter of what it is today—and there is already a chronic shortage in many places. (See past and projected populations below, as estimated by the U.S. Bureau of the Census.)

Crisis. This demographic time bomb ticking away in our midst won’t detonate all at once. Instead its effects, signs of which are already evident, will steadily build to a head over the next twenty years, with potentially dire consequences for the quality and cost of care.

Opportunity.  Healthcare for the aging is often described along a continuum, with Assisted Care typically occupying an area between routine outpatient Primary Care and much more intensive and expensive Skilled Care and Acute Care (over 80% of healthcare costs occur in the last years of life). Though each of these areas carries its own serious resource and cost questions, the greatest opportunity to address such questions, and the greatest opportunity to improve quality of life, exists within Primary and Assisted Care.

One important example: innovations that prolong Assisted Care relative to Skilled will conserve scarce resources and improve the lives of tens of millions—not the least of which by allowing more people to spend most or all of their latter years in their own homes, those of their families, or within settings far less institutional than nursing homes and hospitals.

Past and Projected Populations