After the End of Free Fall: Geriatricizing Primary Care

Excerpt

By 1965, the baby boomers were already on the planet. It was fairly simple arithmetic to estimate that America would therefore have 65 million older adults about 65 years later. This simple arithmetic, however, was not sufficiently intimidating to stimulate an early investment in “geriatricizing” our health care system. In 1965, Sir Geoffrey Vickers told the story of a man who fell from the top of a skyscraper, “He was heard to say to himself as he whistled past the second floor, ‘Well, I’m alright so far’.” Vickers suggested that the story captures two absurdities about human behavior. First “is the absurd speed with which we come to accept as normal almost any outrageous condition” and second “is the absurd slowness with which we come to accept as real any impending change which has not yet happened, however near and certain it may be.” 1 We have now reached the end of free fall. …