The authors respond

We would like to thank all of the commentators for their thoughtful contributions. Our purpose in writing the paper was to stimulate discussion and debate on the issue of an appropriate societal policy response to an aging population in Canada. We wanted to focus on the full range of factors that can have impacts on older persons, from the population health and environmental context to actual care delivery for people with ongoing care needs. Over the next few decades, there will be an increasing number of older people with chronic health conditions in Canada. Over the past decades, we had a younger population whose members often needed acute interventions. Thus, the focus was on acute care hospitals. This pressure, and the Canada Health Act, which insures only hospitals and medical services, has led, as Cripps notes, to a system focused on sickness rather than health. In the future, we shall need a high-priority focus on longer-term healthcare for an aging population. Continuing care, not acute care hospitals, will be the vehicle for providing that care. While we value the comments of each contributor, something else has emerged from the authors’ comments. In our view, taken together they foreshadow much of the type of discussion and debate we shall have in Canada on policies for older adults going forward. As such, we welcome the opportunity to comment on, and clarify, the issues noted in our paper in order to advance, and refine, future policy discussions regarding older persons. Given the number of commentators and both the commonality of comments as well as the differences of opinion across commentators, The Authors Respond