Becoming ill or living with a chronic medical condition can mean losing insurance coverage or not being able to obtain it. Long-term care coverage is insufficient (Lankarge). Many elderly and disabled Americans enter nursing homes and other institutions when they would prefer to remain at home. Families weaken their savings trying to provide care for disabled relatives. Many Americans in inner cities and rural areas do not have access to quality care, due to poor distribution of doctors, nurses, hospitals, clinics and support services. Public health services are not well integrated and coordinated with the personal care delivery system. Many serious health problems such as lead poisoning and drug-resistant tuberculosis are handled inefficiently or not at all, and thus potentially threaten the health of the teachers of the past just as most of the students today. (Lankarge).
Aging baby boomers the first wave of the 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964, are already reaching their mid-50s and are requiring more care. Today's baby boomers are demanding expensive cutting-edge medical technology and are being influenced by consumer-oriented advertisements for prescription drugs. A decline of managed care hailed a decade ago as a controlling force in medical costs, health maintenance organizations have fallen on harder times (Boomers). While managed care was able to hold premiums flat during much of the 1990s, it wasn't able to restrain the underlying growth in health care costs, particularly in prescription drugs and hospital costs. With the rise of hospital providers managed care led to a consolidation of health care providers, which have turned the tables on managed care organizations in negotiating payments. Where on the other hand HMOs once threatened to exclude individual hospitals that didn't meet their pricing demands. Now with the rising cost of premiums, the unemployed often lose their health insurance or are unable to afford temporary insurance plans.
