My mother fell down the stairs outside our back door a handful of years ago, when she was in her late 80s. Within what felt like a heartbeat, my father collapsed and broke his femur, as a result of a heart that didn’t beat often enough. Neither of my parents would return to my childhood home again, my dad spending his remaining days in a nursing home, or what we in the healthcare biz call “long-term care.”
Populations across many wealthy countries are aging. That means a huge swath of people will soon find themselves needing some kind of long-term care.
Here is a quick look at what the aging of a population means for how much a country spends on long-term care. The data, published in the journal Health Affairs, come from Japan.
The first picture illustrates the rapidity with which overall spending increases as people age. Healthcare spending for a Japanese nonagenarian comes in at four times the amount spent on someone in their 50s:
The second picture shows how quickly long-term care spending has been growing in Japan, with the green bars illustrating year-to-year increases. Japan is beleaguered by accelerating costs, growing most years by 5%, 10%, or even greater amounts:
Another example of rampant inflation? Nope! In fact, as pictured above in orange, fees for long-term care in Japan have been essentially flat for two decades
If fees are flat and spending is skyrocketing, that can only mean one thing: the number of people getting long-term care in Japan is rising. That’s because Japan has the oldest population on the planet. A full 28% of people in Japan are over 65 years old, and 10% are over 80. Compare that to the U.S., where those numbers are 16% and 2%, respectively.
Japan is older than us now, but their demographics are our future. In a couple decades, our population will be as old as Japan’s is now. That means we will likely be seeing 5%, 10%, or greater increases in nursing home spending, year in year out, for a while. And we are not prepared.
Even if we remain stingy about how much we pay nursing homes for their valuable services; even if we freeze nursing home spending – our nursing home bills are still going to rise substantially.
It is not a sexy topic; you won’t hear it discussed by Presidential candidates. But we need to find ways, soon, to come up with the money to provide our elderly loved ones with the long-term care they deserve.
