Health Care in Canada: Boomers Not A Burden to Health-Care System

While prepping for the fast approaching holiday season, here is one less thing to worry about. So go ahead and deck the halls with merriment knowing that you are not going to crash the health care system for generations to come.

Boomers Not A Burden to Health-Care System

A new report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives discovered that Canada’s aging population will have little impact on the cost of maintaining a viable national public health-care system over the next 40 years. The report seeks to debunk the myth of runaway costs as baby boomers enter their final years.

The research predicts that the aging baby-boomer generation will add less than one per cent to health-care costs each year. It also reassures everybody that the cost of maintaining the health-care system well into the future will be easily met by economic growth.

Taking into account aging, population growth and inflation, Canada’s public system can be maintained at current levels by increasing expenditures about 4.4 per cent a year. That’s below the nominal growth in the economy, which has averaged 5.4 per cent over the past 20 years.

The report also found that health-care costs do not rise uniformly as people age. In fact, most of the costs associated with aging occur in the last year of life, at rates about 50 to 100 times higher than seniors in general.

In conclusion, the report says that aging contributed a mere 0.8 per cent to the cost of public health care in the last decade. Extrapolating into the future, the costs associated with aging will rise slightly but remain less than one per cent per annum over the next 40 years. The biggest cost drivers in the health-care system are for new drugs, diagnostic imaging and usage – not the aging population!

printer friendly

Email this to a friend