The gap between demand and supply is expected to widen each year thereafter. Nursing shortages are already being experienced throughout the country for critical care nurses and nurses aides. The aging of the population and the expected health care workforce shortages are a formula for significant health care inflation. These are serious questions and ones that we are not talking about. We think that death is an option in this country and are currently using the ostrich strategy ignore it long enough and somehow it will go away.
Elder care needs to shift back to the family and community.
I predict that the same kind of revolution that happened with the birthing experience will occur with dying as we boomers can no longer run away from our own mortality and the mortality of our parents. Birth was always a family experience until the middle of the last century when it became medicalized. Fathers and mothers were separated, mothers were wheeled into the operating room anesthetized to unconsciousness, the baby was delivered and whisked to a nursery where the father could see it through a glass window, and finally the mother awoke the next day to find out about the outcome. It was a consumer movement of female boomers that demanded a more family friendly birthing experience that radically changed these practices. The same phenomenon has occurred with the dying experience.