Health Care for the Elderly: Policy Demands and Individual Needs

As with two storm systems colliding, one of the great health care struggles over the next few decades will be the clash between the demands of policy to reform the Medicare program in order to manage its growing costs and the ever improving but usually expensive clinical care that can now be provided to elderly patients. The extension to the elderly of surgical and other forms of treatment once thought impossible, and the antiageist triumph that extension symbolizes, is a remarkable triumph for medical progress. But managing the costs of that triumph has yet to be mastered, portending a rationing of high technology medicine for the elderly in the years to come. Fortunately, improved living standards and public health are likely to see better health for the elderly even if there is a limitation of expensive technologies. (c)1999 by CVRR, Inc.