A MAP 150 Demonstration Project
Our current care system for seniors was built in a time when societal needs and demographics were quite different. The current system is troubling for a variety of reasons, including: an emphasis on institutional care, even though that’s not the preferred method of care; as people live longer, the need for costly intense, critical care has grown; smaller families and greater mobility leaves many elderly with few children to care for them, and yet there is likely to be a shortage of health care workers; insufficient savings for retirement; many seniors feel stranded in their homes because they lack access to transportation; seniors and their loved ones have difficulty finding the care they really want.
While there is broad consensus that the current system is inadequate and anachronistic, reform efforts – indeed even coming up with new ideas! – are having trouble gaining any traction. The Citizens League has an hypothesis about why this might be so: most policy design efforts attempt to fix the system’s problems, rather than people’s problems.
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