argued this point ( Friedland and Summer 1999 ; Leone 1997 ; Singer and Manton 1998 ). Many other countries are years ahead of the United States in population aging; some will reach the "2030 burden level" as early as 2010 ( Congressional Budget Office 1994 ). The United States will have more time to prepare than most industrialized nations and will be able to learn from these nations' experiences. A second factor that might make the burden of long-term care less striking than expected in 2030 is improvement in the health status of the elderly. Recent data from the National Long-Term Care Survey reported by Manton and Gu (2001) indicates that the disability rate for all elderly dropped from 26.2 percent in 1982 to 19.7 percent in 1999. This meant that there were more than 100,000 fewer disabled elderly in 1999 than in 1982, despite a one-third increase in the population of the elderly. In prior work, Singer and Manton (1998) estimated that a relative rate of disability decline of 1.5 percent a year over the next few decades would maintain the current level of burden each disabled elderly places on economically active Americans. This decline is actually significantly less than the 2.6 percent relative rate of decline experienced between 1994 and 1999. Declines in the nursing home population, particularly among the oldest old, have accompanied these disability trends ( Bishop 1999 ). A more mixed, although guardedly optimistic, picture of disability trends has been offered by other demographers