Improving Health in an Aging Society in America
American aging population makes up a substantial social challenge. These social problems will increase significantly over the next 50 years. Single, divorced, or widowed women as well as members of racial minorities are particularly dangerous to draining chronic health problems, poverty, and unmet health and social needs as they are aging.
As the older population arises, so will the number of vulnerable protection older people. This group of people is facing the challenges involved in making sure that existing health, housing, social services, and environmental infrastructures have the capability to serve them.
In this article we will discuss several propositions about how people can age in a healthy way. Ordinary citizens and policymakers alike oftentimes focus on fears that “greedy” older adults, who are completely depending on government platforms, will wipe out the nation’s financial resources at the disbursement of more youthful generations.
Aging baby boomers and a series of life-extending medical and public health advances have put up to a demographic alteration that hopes to have wide-ranging implications for all aspects of society. Not only it is implicated to older adults but especially vulnerable to debilitating chronic health conditions and unmet medical and social needs, but the substantial social and economic inequalities that already exist within the elderly population prognosticate to become more pronounced.
The Foundation has attempted to improve systems of supportive services for older adults and persons with disablements largely by making grants to improve home- and community-based services and to integrate health and long-term care services.
This led to the development of programs for older adults that promoted physical activity, civic engagement, and elder- friendly communities. The Foundation’s efforts to improve the quality of life of older Americans can be viewed in the context of the efforts of the federal government and of other foundations.
Health promotion and chronic disease research and prevention, in-home care, and other services that are provided locally to low-income seniors. The National Institute on Aging (part of the National Institutes of Health) was established in 1974 to provide leadership in, among other areas, aging research, training, and the dissemination of health information.
Many regional, family foundations, and community have made aging a grant constructing priority. For more than twenty years, the Retirement Research Foundation has been funding service programs and research that address aging and retirement issues. Recently, Atlantic Philanthropies has given priority to workforce issues and civic engagement in its program on aging and health. California’s Archstone Foundation funds only programs involving older adults, such as those to reduce falls and to improve care toward the end of life.
As awareness about the aging of the American population spreads, so too does the sense that an increasing older population represents a challenge rather than an opportunity. Similarly, policymakers worry about the growing number of older people who will expect to receive Social Security checks monthly, and those whose designed health care costs will overburden Medicare and Medicaid budgets from government.
Drawing on the literature and on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s go through in the field, we have named five propositions that can serve as a model for discussions about aging and can help advocates, foundations, government agencies, and older consumers develop policies and programs that will promote the health and well-being of older adults.