Aging Population In Canada

Introduction
The debate about how the aging population affects health care costs
The focus is to examine whether the aging population within Canada is the cause for the rise of health care costs. In 2011, Canada like other developed countries are undergoing a demographic shift where the Baby Boomer cohort with the first of them reaching 65 years of age and others follow (Evans, R., McGrail, K., Morgan, S., Barer, M., Hertzman, 2001). People believe that with this increase of aging population will lead to a rise of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita health expenditures and postulate that economy may not be able to sustain itself with this heavy demand on health care costs. Additionally, the media often portray that governments are in
The reason for this belief is because some people assume that with the growing aging population, it will be a burden on the health care system. After World War II, there has been a decrease of birth rate and the older population life expectancy has been increasing with them living longer compare to previous decades (Evans, R., McGrail, K., Morgan, S., Barer, M., Hertzman, 2001). With the increasing dependency ratio from the increase of elderly above age 65 will put more burden on the working age population age 20-64 (Chappell & Hollander, 2011). People is worry that the working population will not be able to sustain the Baby Boomers from the aging population. Statistics in 1998 demonstrate that those who are age 65 and older spend per capita for health is five times greater than those between age 20 to 64 (Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), 2011). People in the working population is worry that there will not be enough of them to support the larger growing amount of the older population. In addition, the working population is worry they will need to pay more taxes toward health care later on and they deemed it is unfair that they have to pay the needs of the older population. Thus, this is the reason why people may believe and blame the older population are the
Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) establish a Resource Intensity Weights (RIW) to measure hospital use by number of visits and the resources patients use during those visits. Overall, even though there has been a decrease of the number of beds in the hospital, but the time seniors stay in hospital have increased. It has been estimated the amount of time seniors stay in hospital is 1.5 times more than of non-senior. The reason seniors stay a longer length of time in hospital may due to the fact that doctors need to have a longer examination on them to ensure that they are healthy enough before discharging them. As a matter of fact, another analysis shows that hospital use for acute care was 70% higher for seniors compare to non-seniors (Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), 2011). National Population Health Survey (NPHS) data also show the older population usage of the hospital, home care services, residential care, continuing care and medical drugs have increased with age. In particular, Health Insurance and Canadian Public Policy estimated people above age 75 receive three times the hospital care compare to those age 65-74 (Taylor, 1978). Especially, during the last few months of life of the individual that is when the health