Home Health & Hospice Week

Who will your client base be in coming years? You can look to a new study by the U.S. Census Bureau for clues.

In 1980, there were 720,000 people aged 90 and older in the United States. In 2010, there were 1.9 million people aged 90 and older; by 2050, the ranks of people 90 and older may reach 9 million, the Census Bureau says in a new report commissioned by the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health.

A majority of the 90-plus population are widowed white women who live alone or in a nursing home, according to the report. Almost all of them have health insurance coverage through Medicare and/or Medicaid and the vast majority say they have one or more types of disability.

"Because of increasing numbers of older people and increases in life expectancy at older ages, the oldest segments of the older population are growing the fastest," the NIA's Richard Suzman says in a release. The report is at www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-17.pdf.