Health Care Demographics

Demographics Paper

Everyone knows that the natural life cycle is young to old. Due to advances in technology, as well as increased knowledge of disease and proper course of treatment American men and women are living much longer. With the increase in life expectancy, there are changes in the health care market that must take place in order to meet the needs of the aging population, as well as keep these benefits for generations to come.

According to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare, 2009 reports has "triggered analysis on claims that an aging population is the major cause of spending growth on Medicare and other social insurance programs, and those that would like to undermine the current Social Security and Medicare programs can be expected to use the Trustee's reports' data on solvency as a rationale for privatizing, or otherwise dismantling, these successful programs". The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare acts as a steward of programs critical to the retirement security of all Americans and is attempting to set the record straight about the future challenges faced by our Nation's premier health care system for seniors (National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, 2009). Medicare costs are for the most part aggravated by the same factors that have caused the steady upward bound health care costs for workers and their employers, and which the nation has yet to deal with, and has to date, been powerless to resolve.

This interrelationship means that things will not change without addressing the problems of our nation's healthcare system as a whole and attempting to limit future cost increases in Medicare is not the way to solve the problem. Most of our seniors are mostly lower income in fact a lot of them live below poverty and have to decide whether to buy the medicine that they need or to buy food that they also need. These people have paid their way all their life and now they have to choose whether they eat or get the medicine that they need to remain healthy. This seems to be totally unfair and the fact that we do have elderly immigrants here these programs cover, whether they are legal or illegal.

According to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare, the "vital statistic the American men and women are living longer. So knowing that we have the baby boomer hitting their retirement age this do have an adverse affect on Medicare. Even when all the baby boomers are retired, again once the baby boomers are retired and society has absorbed this. The Medicare cost is projected to continue to rapidly grow. To put it likely, as information technology constant development of new technology is expected to cause health care expenditures to continue to grow faster than the economy as a whole. So while long-term projections of Medicare's costs are subject to demographic and economic uncertainties, they are also subject to an additional layer of uncertainty caused by increases in general health care costs.

According to Zullo,