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Simulations show that population aging is likely to slow economic growth and improvements in living standards. Although reforms to raise labor force participation and productivity growth can mitigate these adverse effects, they are unlikely to eliminate the need for fiscal reforms. The budget will come under pressure from rising age-related expenditures, and consolidation will be needed to preserve debt sustainability.

New Zealand's demographic outlook—a likely doubling in the proportion of elderly people by 2050—is similar to that of many countries. Moreover, health care studies in other countries have reached similar conclusions about past and future expenditure growth (Newhouse, 1993; Cutler and Sheiner, 1998; Jacobzone, Cambois, and Robine, 2000). Internationally, aging is likely to exert the same consistent, but manageable, pressure on health expenditure. Thus, if health expenditures reach unsustainable levels in coming decades, it will not be because of population aging.

The Institute opened its research facility in 1999. It was the first independent institution in the United States to respond to a call from the National Institute of Medicine to establish ten centers to study aging. The majority of the Institute’s funding now comes from federal grants, foundations, and donations.

Beryl Buck was trained as a nurse. Prior to her death in 1975, she asked that the Buck estate be used, in part, “to extend help toward the problems of the aged.”

A European Technology Platform (ETP) is a European network bringing together researchers, industry and other relevant stakeholders in a particular technological field in order to foster European research and development in the concerned area.

In a first phase, stakeholders of a specific area, led by industry, come together to agree on a common vision. The second phase is the defining of a Strategic Research Agenda, setting out the medium- to long-term objectives for the technology. In a third phase, stakeholders implement the Strategic Research Agenda with the mobilisation of significant financial and human resources.

FDA is a scientific bureaucracy with police powers. Patients and physicians are free to choose only those drugs and medical devices that it has approved. When FDA approves a therapy that later turns out to be unexpectedly risky, the agency is the subject of front-page headlines and congressional hearings. On the other hand, when FDA delays a badly needed new therapy, patients will suffer but hardly anyone will blame FDA.

Consider, for example, FDA's 10-year delay, in 1967-76, in approving beta-blockers to prevent death following heart attacks, because of the agency's fear that the drugs might be carcinogenic. During those years, the drugs saved lives in Europe and elsewhere, while an estimated 10,000 heart attack victims unnecessarily died in this country each year. When beta blockers were finally approved in the US, to wide acclaim, hardly anyone raised the lethal effects of FDA's slowness.

As it turns out, however, that extra agency caution doesn't actually improve drug safety. Studies conducted by FDA itself show that the rate of drug withdrawals has remained essentially unchanged over the last 25 years, despite rising and falling approval times during that period.