Title: Beneficiary profile: yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Abstract: The distribution of the population in the United States has shifted with considerable rapidity in both the number and proportion of the population 65 years of age or over. This population group has grown and will continue to grow at a rapid rate for the remainder of the 20th century and is expected to increase well into the next century. In the 50-year period 1940-90, the elderly population grew twice as fast as the population under 65 years of age. The U.S. Bureau of the Census (1993) projects that a similar differential rate of growth for the elderly population will continue in the next 50-year period, 1990-2040. At the turn of the century, there were only 3.1 million elderly people, 4.0 percent of the total population (Table 1). Forty years later the number of elderly had tripled to 9 million, as the proportion increased to 6.8 percent. By 1994 the elderly population had more than tripled again, to 33.2 million persons, comprising 12.7 percent of the total population. The growth of the elderly population is attributable to the increased survival of the large generations of Americans born during the first quarter of this century, when birth rates were higher than they are today. The aging of the 19 million immigrants who entered the United States in the first three decades of
Publication Year: 1996
Publication Date: 1996-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['pubmed']
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Cited By Count: 24
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