Business View - August 2015 163
The Impact of Population Shifts
To achieve this, a critical area to address is our spend-
ing on patients in their last year of life, which the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
estimates consumes nearly 30 percent of Medicare ex-
penditures. Add to this the largest “retirement class”
in the history of United States with the aging of 78 mil-
lion Baby Boomers (over 26 percent of the entire U.S.
population) and it’s easy to see that continuing reform
is critical to manage this potential crisis.
As 10,000 Boomers turn age 65 every single day for
the next 18 or so years, they will drive change. At the
other end of the age spectrum, however, are Millen-
nials, those born between 1982 and 2003. Like the
Boomers before them, they are well educated, but un-
like them, they experienced two dramatic economic
downturns more akin to the Great Depression expe-
rienced by their great-grandparents or grandparents.
According to the Brookings Institution, Millennials will
comprise more than one in three of adult Americans
by 2020, and make up as much as 75 percent of the
U.S. workforce by 2025. They are socially conscious,
with 89 percent more likely to buy from companies
that supported solutions to specific social issues.
Disease and healthcare disparity will obviously impact
reforms in healthcare going forward. For instance,
according to the U.S. Alzheimer’s Association, an esti-
mated 5.1 million people with Alzheimer’s are age 65
and older; that number will increase 40 percent to 7.1
million by 2025.
In terms of diversity, according to the U.S. Census Bu-
reau, more than half of the growth in the total U.S.
population between 2000 and 2010 was due to an
increase in the Hispanic population, which grew 43
percent. In fact, Hispanics accounted for more than
half of the 27.3 million increase in the total U.S. popu-
HEALTHCARE
