Description: This paper reviews the recently published Canadian literature on changing Canadian demographic profiles and highlights the actuarial aspects of the information provided therein. Discussions of this paper are included.

Description: Accurate forecasts of future health care expenditures for cohorts of elderly individuals can be especially difficult. Current techniques use average per capita costs, based on local experience, adjusted for the cohort's age, sex, institutionalization, and welfare status distribution. This paper presents a method to adjust such per capita cost estimates to reflect more accurately the likely health status of a particular cohort. The adjustment uses the cause-of-mortality profile in the local population, which is a readily available tabulation known to be highly correlated with a major proportion of total medical care expenditures for people beyond age 65. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1984, Vol. 36.