Health care costs usually top the list of impending crises for the public purse. Health crisis over increase in the elderly reports the Sydney Morning Hearld 8 . As McCallum notes, concerns about health care costs while genuine, are used with political purpose 9 . The NSW Premier used the release of the 1996 Census results, showing an increase of 85,785 people over 65 since 1991, as a platform to lobby the Federal Government to increase funding to the NSW government. The Premier sited the ageing of the population as the reason his government had experienced a massive increase in health care spending.
Older people do use more health services than younger people.
However, population ageing is not the sole contributer to escalating health care costs. This may be an over-estimation of the impact of ageing on health care costs. A study of health care costs increases in 20 countries concludes that while it is possible that population aging may increase national health expenditures, no corroborating evidence for such an effect currently exists 13 . Health care expenditure is more a political and policy matter than a result of purely demographic changes. Scanning headlines in 1997 it is easy to conclude that most older people live in nursing homes.