Elderly face new economic woes

November 24, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

The number of Americans at least 90 years old has tripled in recent decades, according to a government analysis released recently, a major shift in population that has implications for social policy, especially regarding housing and health care.

The population of people in that age group has grown since the 1980 census to 1.9 million, according to the report released by the Census Bureau and supported by the National Institute on Aging. Further, it could quadruple in the next four decades, the report notes.

That means that, by mid-century, 20 percent of the total population of the United States will be a person at least 65 and 1 in 10 of those people will be at least 90.

Individuals within this aging population will likely have at least one disability, will live alone or will live in a nursing home. They’re also more likely to be female, because women live longer than men, and will likely be significantly poor.

People are living longer for a variety of reasons — with better and more-available medical care and improved nutrition topping the list. Those improvements prompted the new look at the elderly.

“Traditionally, the cutoff age for what is considered the ‘oldest old’ has been age 85,” stated Census Bureau demographer Wan He, one of the authors, along with Mark Muenchrath, of the report titled “90-plus in the United States, 2006-2008.”

“But increasingly, people are living longer, and the older population itself is getting older. Given its rapid growth, the 90-and-older population merits a closer look,” she said in a prepared statement. “The implications for the family and our society of this growing population are likely to be significant,” the authors stated.

As the population lives longer, its need for services grows. Getting that help, however, could be a problem for an increasingly poor population, especially in tough economic times with the government reconsidering entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

The demographic numbers paint a grim picture.

For example, an older person’s likelihood of living in a nursing facility increases with age. Only 1 percent of people in their upper 60s and 3 percent in their upper 70s were in nursing homes, but that percentage rises to 20 percent for those in their lower 90s, to more than 30 percent for those in their upper 90s, and to nearly 40 percent for those older than 100, according to the report.

Nearly all of those older than 90 and who lived in a nursing home had some disability. But four out of five of those who lived outside a nursing home also had at least one disability, meaning they needed help doing errands and sometimes even just moving around — presenting other financial problems for families and governments.

Poverty becomes increasingly more likely as a person ages, according to the report. During the 2006 to 2008 time period, 14.5 percent of people 90 and older lived in poverty, significantly more than the 9.6 percent of those 65 to 89 who were officially poor.

The annual median personal income for people 90 and older during the period 2006-2008 was $14,760, as measured in inflation adjusted dollars. Almost half of that income — 47.9 percent — came from Social Security, and 18.3 percent came from retirement pension income. All in all, 92.3 percent of those 90 and older received income from the Social Security Administration.