- In Japan, it is called rourei shakai,
the elderly society, so old that one out of three will be 65 or older by
2025.
-
- In Europe, the populations of Italy,
Spain and France are aging so rapidly that there aren't enough young workers
to pay for the coming wave of old-age pensioners.
-
- And in Washington, a blue-ribbon commission
has foundered after a year's effort to keep Medicare from going broke by
2008, just three years before the first of 77 million baby boomers become
eligible for benefits.
-
- The graying of America and most of the
world is both a medical miracle and a demographic time bomb.
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- "Our nation has really not planned
for an aging population," says Andrea Wooten, chief executive officer
of Green Thumb, a nationwide employment service for older Americans. "We're
living now to be 80 and 90 years old, and our whole idea of retirement
and how we view older people is going to have to change."
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- The extension of life is among the most
dramatic achievements of the 20th century: Americans' life expectancy was
less than 50 years in 1900, and only 4% of the population even reached
65. Life expectancy now is 76 years, and 12% are 65 or older.
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- By 2025, one of 5 Americans - 62 million
people, most of them baby boomers - will be 65 or older.
-
- Progress is so rapid that life expectancy
could reach 80 or more in the next decade. Eighty-year-olds already are
the fastest-growing age group.
-
- But every upward tick in life span has
an even larger impact on society and the economy: the cost of prescription
drugs, the solvency of Social Security, family structure, workplace patterns.
Many worry that advances in science may outstrip society's ability to handle
it all.
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- "There are plenty of very serious
people who believe we are on the edge of some very real longevity breakthroughs,"
says Peter Peterson, former presidential adviser, investment banker and
author of Gray Dawn, which warns of global economic disaster from the world's
accelerating age wave. "If something of that order of magnitude were
to happen, if longevity were to go up, say, another 10 years, watch out!"
-
- As part of <http://www.usatoday.com/2000/future.htmUSA
TODAY's series of special reports on the millennium, Wednesday's Life section
features a three-page look at the medical, financial and personal implications
of living longer. But life extension also is consuming lawmakers, economists,
health care professionals and workplace specialists.
-
- "Pension programs of all kinds will
almost evaporate,'' predicts Ben Bova, author of Immortality, who foresees
a dramatic increase in healthy long life. "The societal change is
already beginning, with so many people outliving their pension plans. Think
of Don Ameche in that movie Cocoon. That's an exaggeration, but that's
where the world is headed."
-
- Adds Peterson: "This is no extrapolation.
The elderly of the next century have already been born. We can count them.
It'll probably take a crisis for major reforms to take place. And that
crisis may start abroad."
-
- Many experts point to Japan as a harbinger
of the coming global age crisis. Life expectancy is soaring there, up to
84 for women and 77 for men. But birthrates are plummeting. Though the
trend could reverse, Japan's total population will go into decline by 2010,
according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
-
- Already, many pension plans have gone
bankrupt or have reduced payouts, and there's talk of raising the retirement
age to 74 and reducing pensions by 20% by the year 2025. There's also
a proposed 10-year-plan to bring in immigrant workers to make up for labor
shortages.
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- "There's going to be a tremendous
burden on social security," says Hiroshi Kojima of Japan's National
Institute of Population and Social Security Research. "You could
even say the recession is partly caused by this, because people are saving
money for their old age instead of spending it."
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- Paying for the oldest of the old
-
- Similar strains are taking hold in the
USA.
-
- When Medicare was created in 1965, a
whole range of medical procedures and technologies now regarded as commonplace
didn't exist. Among them: MRIs and CT scans, knee and hip replacements,
angiograms and coronary bypass operations, fiber-optic endoscopic operations
and even organ transplants. Today all are understood by most Americans
and are expected benefits. And all are expensive.
-
- Medicare now costs $207 billion a year.
In 30 years, that figure easily could be $2.2 trillion to $3 trillion.
-
- A key measure driving this is the sixfold
growth in the oldest-old, the 85-year-olds and older, who are the biggest
burden on health care and each of whom cost the system about $10,000 a
year. The majority live in nursing homes or at home with assistance. About
half are dependent on others.
-
- Edward Schneider, dean of the school
of gerontology at the University of Southern California, warns that if
baby boomers are no healthier at 85 than today's 85-year-old, the future
could be grim.
-
- "There will be enormous numbers
of people requiring health care,'' Schneider says. "We don't have
the facilities right now. We've been closing hospitals for years and we
are not building new nursing homes."
-
- Medical breakthroughs are a two-edged
sword. Medicare, which is now taking 5.2% of payroll in taxes, is projected
to require 13.6% in 2040. Even a small but unexpected extension of two
years to average life spans would add another annual 2%, says Neil Howe,
a demographic expert who has worked with Peterson. Taxes would almost
triple.
-
- "Medicare and Medicaid already hugely
underestimate future costs'' of health care, Howe says. "That, added
to the demographics, makes the whole thing totally explode in the next
century."
-
- Not every forecast is dire. Researchers
at the <http://www.nih.gov/nia/ National Institute on Aging were surprised
to find that disability levels for people 65 and older have been falling
since 1982. They expected 25% of that age group to be disabled based on
rates in the early 1980s. Instead, they discovered a decrease of 14.5%,
or in human terms, 1.2 million fewer people with conditions that require
care or services.
-
- Richard Suzman, director of the NIA's
Office of Demography of Aging, called the unexpected trend "one of
the most important findings in demography that I've seen in many years.
If it continues, the overall burden for disability and long-term care becomes
certainly more manageable."
-
- Boomers could face career limits
-
- No one can predict what will happen when
a new generation of young people finds a world populated by aging parents
and much older co-workers.
-
- "By 2010-2015, there will be a substantially
different national mood," Howe says. "You'll have baby boomers
in positions as elderly national leaders, and Generation X, which has
had very little to interest in politics up to now, in mid-life and trying
to position themselves as the next generation."
-
- But there may not be enough Generation
Xers to pick up the family burdens.
-
- David Townsend, 34, of Indianapolis already
is experiencing the pressures. He says he spends 40% of his time caring
for his disabled mother.
-
- "I can't save the whole world, but
I can save my own mom," says Townsend, adding that "most agencies
that assist those in crisis are overwhelmed. The waiting lists are a mile
long. If we keep going as we are now (as a society), we are just going
to be at a loss."
-
- Other changes may show up at work, where
re-training is taking on new popularity with older citizens.
-
- "The concept of lifelong learning
has never been more important," says Wooten, whose agency has found
new work for 40,000 low-income seniors. "We just graduated a class
of information technology professionals. Most of them were career-changes."
-
- Bova says things could go even further.
"We're going to see all kinds of new term limits, where people will
be forced to change careers," he says. "They'll have to move
over to make room for others."
-
- Contributing: Tim Friend, Karen S. Peterson,
William M. Welch, Haya El Nasser, Cindy Hall and Peter Hadfield in Tokyo.
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