Evolution and Progression of Global Aging Initiatives

The University of Arizona Global Campus

HUD 5420 Interdisc Theories of Ger Instructor: Gregory Hickman

June 22, 2022

Blueprint for Healthy Aging- Social Policy, Legal and Regulatory Issues

In the United States, the government has been keen on healthy living. This is after realizing a high number of people have been affected by unhealthy lifestyles that have been adopted. The government has been recording a high rate of lifestyle diseases, with the aging population taking up the highest percentage. The situation compelled the government to establish and implement the Healthy People Initiative, currently in its fifth edition dabbed as Healthy people 2030. The initiative is manned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (DPHP), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to improve overall public health by assisting people in living a healthy lifestyle. Several policies and laws have been created and implemented to ensure that the initiative achieves its mission. The policies are classified into six categories: mandates, restrictions; economic incentives; marketing limits; environmental defaults; and information provision.

It is a fact that a majority of aging people in the United States have been affected by unhealthy lifestyles, which makes them vulnerable to lifestyle diseases like diabetes type 2, obesity, hypertension, stroke, heart disease, and atherosclerosis, among others. Through the social, legal, and regulatory policies implemented, at least the aging population is provided with situations that save them from contracting lifestyle diseases leading to healthy aging and expansion of overall lifespan.

One of the policies is having processed foodstuffs like flour, rice, margarine, and other packed foods supplemented with healthy nutrients. This policy mandates companies in food products manufacturing and packaging to ensure that the foodstuffs meet the set standards and that they are packed with nutrients. According to Bartlett & Underwood (2009), advanced technology helps determine compliance with this regulation. By so doing, the government makes sure that people feeding on the foodstuffs would have nutritional benefits. This is one of the policies falling under the mandates category because any company that fails to comply is eligible to face legal consequences for risking users' lives. The policy does not target the aging population. Still, it only directly works towards ensuring people of all ages feed on healthy products and that they develop and maintain healthy bodies and minds.

Through the initiative, the government has implemented restriction policies, for instance, on how fast and unhealthy food products are advertised and other health-threatening products like cigarettes and beer. In reality, the government states that consumers must be informed of health pending dangers after consuming the consequences for consumers to be aware. At the same time, through social welfare programs, the aged people are encouraged through training on the importance of constant medical checkups to have any condition detected and handled in a timely and reliable manner. By so doing, the aged are saved from having advanced conditions that negatively affect their lives and lead to hastened deaths.

In the healthcare sector, the government, through the Medicare program, has regulated how older people over the 65years would access quality yet affordable healthcare services. This is a great privilege because most healthcare challenges facing older adults are costly to manage, and the medicare plan has empowered many elderly people to get their already developed lifestyle diseases attended to in a timely and convenient manner.

It is a fact the government has taken some amount of action to save the elderly people from unhealthy lifestyle life threats. However, a considerable percentage of aging persons continue to be affected. This is because most challenges develop gradually from earlier stages, only for the impact to be felt in later stages of life. This is why many lifestyle diseases affecting the aging population can only be managed since it has already reached their advanced stages (Bengtson et al., 2016). With this realization, the government must embrace more effective policies through the same healthy people initiative. The most convenient proposal is where the solutions to aging lifestyle challenges should not be applied when people get to their older adult stages but in their childhood and latest teenage.

The government should introduce a model where the youths are trained on how to feed correctly, engage in sports, and avoid toxic substances. The government should have a mandatory program through which people should go through medical checkups just like it is done with vaccinations to have all people screened and tested for different lifestyle diseases. At the same time, the doctor offers advice on things to do and avoid on a personal level. Making it mandatory for people to go through annual free testing and screening for ailments that affect the body the, most precisely diabetes, all types of cancer, heart disease, stroke, and others, would go a long way in making people understand the importance of living a healthy life from early stages in life. As stated by Bartlett & Underwood (2009), modern-day technology can help make testing and screening easier, faster, and highly effective. This trend and behavior that people would grow up practicing leads to healthy aging.

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