Boomers to overload health system

Last of five parts

The nation’s health care system is in for a shock as the baby boomers move into their retirement years.

Geriatric care specialists agree that medical resources will be inadequate for the burgeoning senior population, expected to double from 35 million to 70 million in less than 20 years.

“The shortage will be disastrous. It’s really scary,” says Russell Bodoff, executive director of the Center for Aging Services Technology with the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging (AAHSA).

Larry Minnix, chief executive officer of AAHSA, says an “overburdening” of health care is “coming close now.”

In this series, The Washington Times has examined how the boomers are living out their own vision of getting older, but the aging of America’s largest generation also will rock the social-service and health care systems created by their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

The health of Americans older than 65 has been improving since the early 1980s, according to a recent Rand Corporation study. Both Rand, a California-based nonprofit research organization, and the National Institute on Aging (NIA) say some financial savings could be realized if the trend continues.

“We need to find out why and to seek ways to maintain that decrease in disability rates,” NIA spokeswoman Vicky Cahan says.

But the Rand study notes that “diseases such as obesity and diabetes are increasingly prevalent among the young,” suggesting that “future Medicare beneficiaries might be less healthy than current ones.”

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 40 percent of Americans 45 to 64 have high blood pressure, and 36 percent are obese. Both are serious risk factors for heart disease and stroke, the number one and number three causes of death, respectively, in the United States.

The Rand study, released in late September, predicts that new medical technologies, likely to be in widespread use in the next 25 years, could greatly increase Medicare costs, posing financial risk to the government’s health insurance program for the elderly, which already faces serious problems.

Single treatments with new medical technologies, such as implantable defibrillators for heart ailments or drugs to prevent Alzheimer’s, could raise Medicare costs by as much as 70 percent, the study says.

“This technology is valuable because it will improve health and extend lives. But we need to begin thinking about how to pay for it,” says Dana Goldman, chief health economist for Rand and principal author of the report.

Growing costs

Mr. Goldman predicts that any savings realized through lower elderly disability rates will be offset by increased spending on healthy Medicare recipients who live longer.

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