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Essay on Poverty in the Elderly
Historically, the United States has been formed by immigration with a relatively young population, typically younger than other countries such as in Western Europe. High rates of immigration traditionally make a population younger because it is the young who are most likely to migrate. In addition, death rates were higher at the turn of the century when fewer people lived to an old age; the major improvements in the average years of life have come from improvements at the beginning of life through reduced rates of infant and maternal mortality.
Life expectancy refers to the average number of years a person has remaining in life at a certain age. Early data from Massachusetts indicate that its residents had life expectations of about thirty-five years at birth. By 1900 this had increased to forty-seven years. Fifty years later, this had increased to sixty-eight years, and in 1976 was almost seventy-three years (Harris and Cole, 1980). At the turn of the century the lower life expectancy at birth combined with the higher probability of dying from certain infectious diseases in adulthood meant that a very small proportion of the population of the United States was elderly, using a typical definition of elderly as those sixty-five and over. Less than 5 percent of the U.S. population was sixty-five and over in 1900.
Now a much higher proportion of the population of the United States is sixty-five or older -- about 12.5 percent in the early 1980s or 25.7 million people over the age of sixty-four in 1980. Estimates are that the proportion of the population over sixty-five will rise to 12.7 percent in 1990, 13.9 percent in 2010 and perhaps as high as 21.1 percent of the population in 2030. If these estimates hold, there will be almost 40 million elderly in the United States in 2010.......
