Aging Baby Boomers Essay

Baby Boomers are babies that were born after The 2nd World War and the late 1960’s because people decided to start or restart a family and have children; which, ended in a huge spike in births in North America. The new aging baby boomers are hitting retirement age and will be using a huge percentage of our health care and hospital budgets. With the large amount of babies being born in a short span, that large amount of children have not been met since the Baby Boom meaning that there will be more people in retirement than in the work force. When all of the women started giving birth the hospitals were struggling to keep up with all of the births, this also happened with schools in the 1950’s, colleges and universities in the 1970’s, and jobs after that. Now as these Baby Boomers are going into retirement the worries will be in healthcare and the Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) they had reasons to worry because in British Columbia alone between 2022 and 2036 the number of people in BC over age 80 will increase from 250,000 to 435,000 (British Columbia Medical Association, 2011). Although the Baby Boomers may have created a need for more schools/universities/colleges they also created a need for more teachers, doctors and nurses which created more jobs.
Figure 1. BC population, median age and mix by age group: 1980 - 2030

Figure 1. This Table Shows the median age and mix by age group in British Columbia. Adapted from “Background – BC population growth” By British Columbia Medical Association, (2011) Charting the Course retrieved from https://www.bcma.org/files/Charting_the_Course_FINAL.pdf . Reprinted without permission. The Canadian Pension Plan or CPP was designed to provide retirement funds for Canadian citizens which is paid for by every employed person over the age of 18 but if there will be more people in retirement than in the work force the CPP will not be able to function because the 2006 Canadian census told the story of two polarized generations; it predicted that by the year 2016, there would be more Canadians entering the age of retirement than those of legal working age, (Aging in Canada, 2012) with this stat the federal government abolished the mandatory retirement age in the hope that this may help to have an equal amount or more people in the work force rather than in retirement using the Canada Pension Plan this change in law showed that the government was addressing the matter but it did not address the shortages and inaccessibility of the health care system.
Figure 2. Total public health cost by age group Figure 2. This Chart shows the total public health cost by age group. Adapted From “British Columbia’s health expenditures” by British Columbia Medical Association, (2011) Charting the Course, retrieved from https://www.bcma.org/files/Charting_the_Course_FINAL.pdf, Reprinted without permission.
Health care is one of the or should be the largest worries with the Baby Boomers generation because They are taking up a very large portion of the budget already because in 2011, a report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information showed that senior citizens use 40 percent of hospital services and account for 45 percent of all provincial and territorial government health care spending (Aging In Canada, 2012) this large amount is shocking because we have never seen costs like this in healthcare because we have never had such a large amount of elderly people come into retirement with such large amounts of expensive healthcare needs and they have only just begun because the first of the Baby Boomers hit retirement age in 2010 and by now it is only 2013 meaning we are only 3 years in to what will be one of the largest financial troubles Canada has had so far. Figure 3. BC public health expenditures: 2000 – 2010

Figure 3. This table shows British Columbia’s public health expenditures from 2000 to 2010. Adapted from “British Columbia’s health

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