Well, very briefly, first of all, I looked at the literature. I found over 1,000 papers that mentioned the baby boomer population, and they said things like, oh, it's going to be awful, there are going to be a lot more people, we won't have any health professionals. When I whittled it down, I found only 20 papers that actually had evidence out of that 1,000.
What I'm going to do is use data from the national population health survey, because I need to be able to compare people who are 55 or 65 now with people who were 55 or 65 ten years ago and look at time trends in their increasing disability, their self-rated health, and their use of care over time, and see if the slope of the trajectory is the same for different generations--older baby boomers, younger baby boomers, and what I've called the wartime babies, people who were born between 1935 and 1945. I hope that in about a year's time I'll be able to give you some of the results.
There are reasons to suppose we might be healthier. We know we've had better health care. We have better education. We've had antibiotics. On the other hand, we're more obese. One of the other difficulties is that people are living longer with chronic diseases when they otherwise would have died. So I think we're going to have two little groups in there: healthy people who look after themselves--probably those of better social class, the richer, the more privileged--and probably the poorer and the more obese, and then the survivors. So I think it's going to be quite complicated, but at least I think it might help us target health care a little bit more practically, and also it might mean that it's not going to be as bad as we think it's going to be.