Rising gas prices. Slumping home sales and values. Rising unemployment. Declining salaries.
When you add it all up, we have some serious challenges to overcome. But there is a larger tsunami of problems on the way, and our Representatives in Congress seem to be better at being reactive to problems instead of being proactive in fixing them.
Over the next 15 years, the number of people in our country over the age of 50 will increase by 74% while the number of people under the age of 50 will increase by a mere 1%. This means that our younger generational workforces will be forced to foot the bill for an expanding, and failing, social security system.
Here’s an interesting blog post from Michigan Home Care Experts about the issues we’re all going to face in the future:
As people live much longer than in the past, few are trained in caring for the function and quality of life for the elderly.
A recent Buffalo News article looks at how the health care system is unprepared to care for the growing number of frail elderly.
As more and more people live longer because of improvements in prevention and care, they live with a precarious combination of chronic diseases and impairments, including dementia and adverse reactions from mixing too many drugs, Henry L. Davis, medical news reporter, says in the article. “They become increasingly frail, until something as simple as a cold or a fall sets off a cascade of complications, any one of which could be fatal,” he writes.
Davis points out that little research has been done on the most effective therapies for the very old, and that the nation faces a shortage of geriatric specialists who are trained in the nuances of caring for the elderly, whose population is expected to double by 2030.
“The health system is designed around episodic care with incentives to hospitalize,” Dr. Robert Schreiber, physician-in-chief of Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Boston and a national expert on geriatrics, said in the article. “We need medical care to the elderly that focuses on the function and quality of life of a person, not just on treating a disease.”
It is a grandiose idea to say that we need national health care and that we need affordable prescription drugs. Grandiose, because we can’t afford this as a nation - we’re already a few hundred billion in debt, and a national health care system would send our banking and financial systems into the ice age. What we can do now, however, is begin grooming future doctors and nurses for geriatric care.
We need to act now so that we can offer the next generation of doctors some incentive to choose geriatric medicine so that we have the support staff and professionals we’ll need in the next 15-20 years to provide care for the Boomer generation. The federal government should offer educational grants and zero interest loans for students in medical school seeking to become geriatric practitioners. When they graduate they’ll be required to work fifty-two days a year, for three years, to repay their student loans, or in return for accepting federal educational grants. By doing so, we’ll fuel the growth of physicians and nurses within this specialty field, and we’ll be able to provide free clinics throughout our country with a rotating staff of doctors and nurses who can properly assess and care for the elderly within the neediest of communities.
How do we pay for this? The no-interest loans can be funded by both public and private contributions and would be repaid, meaning the fund would never be depleted. The grants given can be paid for by reducing the amount f funding to some social programs that already deal with community clinics and senior care programs, perhaps even tapping some monies from Medicare and Medicaid to cover the costs. In turn, we grow the number of geriatric physicians and nurses within the community, we provide for free or low-cost services, and we are able to do so without raising taxes.
It’s time to think outside of the box! My name is Bert Copple and I’m ready to be your next Congressman.
Hope. Faith. Change.
Bert Copple
