Abstract
As the size of the elderly population increases, the need for a variety of new quality elderly care services has also grown. To meet these growing needs, the private sector and the public sector will have to work together.
This new industry is still in its early stages of development, primarily because:
1. The public is still largely unaware of the new services being offered by business.
2. These new services compete with the long-standing subsidized, and therefore lower-priced public sector services.
3. These new companies frequently lack management experience and adequate resources. This new industry must learn how to compete in the marketplace independently, in order to survive. However, the strategic support must be done in a systematic manner by the government. This can be done by both demonstrating the potential size of this market to companies in order to increase interest in participating, as well as clearing away barriers to entry such as subsidized lower priced public services.
The first half of this paper is devoted to defining the needs of our aging society, and assessing how much of this demand can be satisfied by current government services. The part of the demand currently unmet, represents minimum size of the new private sector opportunity. In the second half, we also try to define how much the expected consumer cost from the establishment of the new elderly care insurance system will increase this demand.
Participation of private industry will be required to meet the growing needs of the elderly. It must be given an opportunity to compete fairly with existing public sector, in order to flourish under the new elderly care insurance system.
