The American health care system is out of date and only recently has taken on a national goal to improve the care of older adults, according to a leading researcher.
Speaking during a live interview as part of The Atlantic’s “The New Old Age,” Penn Memory Center Co-Director Jason Karlawish said that older adults are “the last casualties of the Cold War.”
In 1965, he explained, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law legislation creating Medicare. But Cold War rhetoric over socialism led the American Medical Association to produce a medical care system that didn’t take on the challenges of caring for older adults.
What resulted was a plan that, quite simply, paid 1965 doctors to practice 1965 medicine, Karlawish said.
“It didn’t create a health care system to figure out what’s aging, or how to care for older adults. And the result was we’ve this system we’ve got.”
In fact, he argued, it wasn’t until the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the National Alzheimer’s Project Act that the nation began “making an effort to transform the health care system into one that actually figures out how to take care of older adults.”
“The New Old Age” was held September 13 in New York to discuss the impact of a growing elderly population in America. It was part of a series of public discussions hosted by AtlanticLIVE. To see the complete event, click here. For a complete list calendar of AtlanticLIVE events, click here.