Are We Ready to Care for Our Aging Population?

Amol Navathe is interviewed by Sarah Jordan for Philly Mag.

“The 30,000-foot view is that we have three fundamental issues in our system that are the genesis of our problems,” says Amol Navathe, a health policy professor and internist at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-director of the Perelman School of Medicine’s Healthcare Transformation Institute. Navathe identifies the first problem as the smaller share of Americans footing the bill for Medicare than when it was conceived in 1965, when senior citizens were only nine percent of our total population. Financing for the entitlement comes primarily from payroll taxes — about 90 percent, in fact. So there is vastly more need on the immediate horizon, along with a sharply diminishing number of working Americans paying into the pot. Don’t forget to factor in the long-term implications of our country’s declining birth rate. “Financing-wise, we can see that’s a problem, along with care getting more expensive,” says Navathe.