How population aging affects Europe
By Katerina Beranova
The Health of the population in Europe has improved during last few decades. The trend of population aging is also significant in the developing countries. The process of population aging happens later in those countries but it develops more quickly. In my opinion, the reason for this fact is that life expectancy at birth has lengthened and premature mortality has been strongly reduced. The improvement of life and working conditions and also the progress in medical care has contributed to lengthened life expectancy in recent years. But we have to consider whether people spend most of their lives in disability or in health. Nowadays aging of the population in Europe is a current issue that needs to be discussed. It not only affects social and health care in most countries in Europe, but concerns economic politics as well. The main task of all member states of the EU is to adapt their social and health systems and meet requirements of the aging people. Nevertheless, there is also a question whether the systems of health care would have enough financial resources to sustain the needs of old people. Regarding the current estimations, there may be more than 20% of the population older than 64 in Europe in 2025. The number of people older than 65 years will probably increase to 70% and the number of people older than 80 years would increase to 170%.
The quality of life has significantly improved, mainly because people spend their life in a good health condition, they are more independent and they live more actively. I think that in case of the good health condition and independence of aging people, the health care would not be so frustrated and actually would be able to provide service to many people. If aging of our population develops in this way, we could predict a very positive influence on our economic politics. On the other hand, I also would like to mention that population aging also means chronic diseases for many people at the older age. That is why the costs of social, health and family care increase very much.
I personally do not consider aging people that catastrophic. We should not be so pessimistic about it, as the lengthening of human life together with higher number of older people are just results of improvement and development of the quality of human life. Thanks to the development of health care, the health condition of people progressively improves. We still consider retired people as they have only bad economic impact for our countries. We should realize that the presence of older people in our population is very helpful to younger generations, especially for their experiance, skills, knowledge, etc. I always appreciate useful advice older people give me and I do not agree with prejudice of our society. The future will definitely show us if we are able to deal with the trend of demographic aging and its consequences. I guess our governments should prevent us from the negative affects and our politicians should figure out effective solutions for situations that may endanger our economic and social stability.