There are several ways of looking at this. You are asking a difficult question. When I was younger, we talked about the $64,000 question, but today, it is probably the $64 million or $64 billion question. It is very difficult to give a clear answer regarding that aspect. I would say that the Canada Health Act is extremely restrictive, because it only covers medical, hospital and diagnostic services.
However, the more people age, the more they need hospital and medical services, but that is not really where things play out. In fact, the increase in medical and hospital services is much more due to treating people during the last years of their life—one or two years—meaning that the increase in the health, medical and hospital services is not due to aging, but to the time leading up to a person's death. In fact, if you die at the age of 65, you will usually cost much more to the system in terms of hospital and medical services, than if you died at age 85.
However, as far as the other services are concerned, and in particular what we call long-term care services, these go up with age. Integrating these two types of funding is important.