Here is an interesting editorial from a Virgina paper about that state being woefully unprepared to confront the findings of a legislative requirement to "study the impact of Virginia's aging population on the demand for and the cost of state agency services, policies, and program management."
Gilded Boomers: State must prepare for aging generation
Election Campaign rhetoric is largely a list of promises. But hidden beneath the political jive is a list of items that unambiguously require taxpayer support. The costs are often numbing and seemingly out of reach.
Transportation may be the best example: The cost of bringing Virginia's network of roads, rails, and transit systems up to snuff is put at as much as $208 billion. Yet transportation now gets only $4.4 billion a year. Meanwhile, for sheer cost, nothing beats education. Virginia schools and colleges will get more than $12 billion in fiscal 2006--but public schools need at least $1 billion more to reach Standards of Quality goals. And while Virginia is increasing the tens of millions of dollars it spends on the Chesapeake Bay recovery and other environmental programs, the state could easily spend millions more without wasting a penny.
And let's not forget that Virginia's biennial budget is just over $63 billion, or $31.6 billion a year.
So if we are just getting by in the here and how, what about the looming cost of caring for Virginia's aging baby boomers? A report from the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, the legislature's investigative arm, tells us how woefully unprepared we are. Between 2000 and 2030, Virginia's 60-plus population will grow from 1.1 million to 2.4 million. Medicaid, which received $1 billion in 2004, will need an additional $500 million over the next two years to keep pace with inflation and rising enrollment, predicts the Warner administration. As life expectancies increase, costs will rise apace: Older people require more health care. Indeed, the Virginia Department of Medical Assistance Services reports that Medicaid costs by 2030 could be anywhere from $3.9 billion to $11.8 billion a year. Costs for 2004 totaled $1 billion.
The JLARC report offers a snapshot of how the elderly are living now. In every case the situation is exacerbated by the rising population of the aged.
A third of Virginians age 85 or older who rent housing spend
at least half of their income on rent and utilities. Aging-agency personnel
report that
many older Virginians routinely stop paying for medications or utilities
in order
to pay the rent.
The Virginia Department on Aging reports that fewer than half the
hours needed for adult day care were provided in 2004. Fewer than
60 percent
of the delivered
meals needed actually got to the old and hungry.
The Virginia State Council for Higher Education predicts a shortage of 22,600 registered nurses in Virginia by 2020.
All these may seem like just more problems at which
Virginia needs to throw bags of money. The difference is that while transportation
and
education
help improve the quality of our lives, preparing for an aging
population is about
life itself.
If the services aren't there when we need them--if the private
and public sectors can't address the boomers' needs in their
winter years--we'll
have only ourselves
to blame. We can see the problem coming, and we are it.