[Aging of population and medical workforce: a prospective view of health care provision in France in the year 2025]

Abstract

In 2011, the first generations of the French baby-boom will reach their 65th anniversary. In the same year the first cohorts of the French medical "graduate boom" (doctors graduated during the boom period 1974-1994) will reach their retirement age. From 2010 to 2025, French population will increase 4% but the French elderly will increase 40%. Depending on medical student intake policy adopted today, the French medical profession will decrease slowly or drastically. But the most striking feature of the period will be the aging of the medical workforce. Doctors aged 55 years and over will be between 42% and 47% of the medical workforce in 2025, as compared to 41% in 2010 and 14% in 2000. A great amount of factors--of which the demographic ones--will contribute to raise the demand for health care in the two coming decades. On the other side, the demographic change undergone by the medical profession (decrease of the total number, increase of the aged doctors, increase of the female doctors...) will decrease the amount of supply. However, the first problem facing the country is not how to raise the amount of supply but how to finance the forthcoming sharp growth of demand. The problem is not specific to France, as pointed out in a paper drafted twenty years ago.