WORLDVIEW: Swedish Boomers Not Busting Health System

We all hear the conventional wisdom about how the aging Baby Boomers are going to bankrupt the country. Well, Sweden has Baby Boomers too, but their spending on health is lower than ours per capita and stable. How do they do it?

The answers range from free preventive care to widespread adoption of electronic medical records (95 percent of doctors and hospitals use EMRs).

Maggie Mahar at Health Beat blogged about the World Health Care Congress Europe in Berlin and she had a chance to talk to a top economist, Mona Heurgren, on Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare. Sweden has the oldest population in the European Union but its health costs haven't been rising. "Over the last 15 years or so, the share of our citizens who are older has been growing, yet health care spending has stayed level at about 9 percent of GDP," Heurgren told her.

Of course Sweden's national health care package is financed through income taxes, and we believe our country is more likely to reach a bipartisan consensus on health policy through a mix of public and private solutions. And Sweden is a more homogenous, middle-class society. But we can still draw some lessons from Sweden's experiences, mixing old-fashioned primary care and prevention and the high-tech tools of the 21st century.

By the way, our own population isn't aging quite as quickly as we tend to think, Mahar noted. In the next quarter century the median U.S. age will rise three years, to 39. The aging of America does accelerate after that but the problems are not just how many old people we have, it's how wisely we treat them. We particularly liked Maggie's choice of slides (taken from a presentation by Uwe Reinhardt) to illustrate this point: