erly pay around 25 percent; the rest is paid by Medicare and Medicaid, although it needs to be realized that indirectly the elderly have contributed to these funds.
Regarding health care costs, a substantial part of these (and an increasing part) is the costs of treating older people for cancer. According to Davis, Lilienfeld, Gittelsohn and Scheckenbach (1988), the improved diagnosis of cancer has lead to the detection of cases in the elderly that would have formerly have been misrepresented or miscoded as pneumonia, ill-defined causes, senility, or nonspecified cancers.
In an effort to get a more precise idea of cancer rates among the aged, Davis, Lilienfield, Gittelsohn and Scheckenbach (1988) analyzed selected cause-specific mortality trends for whites and nonwhites in ten-year age groups from 35 to 84 years of age for 1968 1978, with the emphasis of the study being placed on persons aged 65 to 84 years. The analysis revealed increasing trends in mortality from lung cancer, brain cancer, and multiple myeloma in older whites and nonwhites, along with increases in several potentially miscoded causes of death, including nonspecific cancer, senility, and other nonspecified causes.
What the foregoing research indicates is that as the century draws to a close, older people are going to increase in numbers; further, there is going to be a large increase in the number of older and elderly cancer patients. These facts highlight the importance of understanding the factors that can maximize or debilitate the quality of care they receive by health care personnel in general and oncology health care personnel in particular.
In other words, research is necessary to discover those factors that can enhance or impair the care received by the older population in general, and the older oncology population in particular. The proposed research may be considered part of this needed research effort.
As just noted, there is a need...