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About a dozen years ago I was passing through O'Hare Airport in Chicago and saw a headline: "Benefit of the Decade." I thought, "Great, another story on child care." So I bought the paper. But when I read it on the airplane, it turned out the article was about elder care.

For over 50 years, the Baby Boom generation has been driving social policy in this nation. In the '50s, the arrival of the baby boom meant the need to construct huge numbers of new elementary schools; in the late '60s and '70s it meant the explosion of the early childhood field, as baby boomers starting having their own babies and needed child care; now the baby boomers are planning to retire, requiring a whole new set of solutions.

Discover magazine (December 2007; www.discovermagazine.com) shared these factoids about "Aging in America":

• The over-65 age group is the fastest growing segment of the population, and its ranks will swell even more rapidly when the first baby boomers reach 65 in 2011. By 2030, there will be 72 million Americans over 65, making up 20% of the population.
• In 1990, there were 37,000 Americans aged 100 and older. By 2000, this number had grown to over 50,000. The trend is even more extreme for people over 85, a group that has grown roughly 30-fold to 4.7 million in the past century.
• 80% of seniors suffer from at least one chronic health condition, such as arthritis or diabetes; 50% have two or more such conditions.

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