What's changed has been the percentage of the elderly and it's currently around 13% or 15%, those of us over 65, c'est moi, and increasing so that by 2030, around 30% of the population will be elderly. We have not prepared for that.
In fact, with the health care restructuring in the mid-1990s we had an across-the-board, across-the-nation reduction of acute care bed capacity in this country of about 30%. Of the remaining beds that still are available, we have about a 15% ALC rate, which is alternate level of care patient, which is the patient who requires to be somewhere other than a hospital but can't go home. From the mid-1990s to the 2019, we've actually had about a 45% reduction in acute care bed capacity.
People keep on coming, but there's nowhere for them to go. The promise has always been we're going to provide better preventative health services and home care. I can tell you that it's a joke. People can't got home so they end up in the hospital waiting months to find a nursing home bed, which doesn't exist. That is a problem which causes crowding. It's not population growth, it's the relative age of the population and inadequate social resources for the elderly.