From 2024 to 2027, a record number of Americans will turn 65 — more than 11,000 every single day. Over 70 million by the end of 2025. (Source) The healthcare consequences of what some call Peak65 or the Silver Tsunami should scare all of us.
There’s been plenty of publicity about falling U.S. life expectancy — and yet relatively little discussion about the Silver Tsunami’s impact on a healthcare system already struggling to keep up.
Framing the Problem
So let me frame just one part of the problem with three simple numbers:
65 / 25 / 10
- For anyone aged 65 or older,
- there’s a 25% chance they’ll experience a major cardiovascular event — like a heart attack or stroke —
- in the next 10 years.
A 2022 study in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that: The median 10-year risk of Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease (ASCVD) in U.S. adults aged 65+ without existing heart disease was 17.9% — with an upper quartile reaching 27.3%.
In fact, 83.9% of adults 65+ met the criteria for high risk — defined as a ≥10% 10-year ASCVD risk or existing disease. (Source)
And yet up to 80% of cardiovascular events are preventable, according to the World Health Organization and the CDC. So why are we still missing them?
Many of these events go undetected until it’s too late — not because the tools don’t exist, but because systemic screening for conditions like atrial fibrillation, valvular heart disease, and early-stage heart failure is often asymptomatic early on, but they’re rarely screened for in routine checkups.
Despite their outsized role in cardiac morbidity and mortality, these conditions fall through the cracks of today’s healthcare protocols.
The truth is: many early cardiac abnormalities are detectable — years in advance. Whether through auscultation, biomarkers, or imaging, the signs are often there.
We just aren’t listening.
While these risks are climbing:
- Healthcare costs are rising.
- Rural access is collapsing.
- Physician burnout is accelerating,
Traditional models of care — reliant on in-person visits, expensive diagnostics, and centralized infrastructure — simply do not scale to meet the needs of 70+ million seniors.
We’re entering an era where more people will need care, for longer, with fewer providers and less time. That’s a math problem the system can’t solve with status quo tools.
A New Standard of Aging Needs a New Standard of Care
What we need isn’t just more hospitals and doctors. We need Smarter diagnostics. Simpler tools. Scalable intelligence — delivered at home, in real time, and affordably.
We need to shift from a world where diagnosis means labs, scans, and waiting rooms — to one where virtual exams work with sensors to flag heart and lung disease from your living room. Where AI and human-in-loop systems can screen for risk before symptoms appear.
70 million people turning 65 is not just a milestone — it’s a siren.
Aging better means detecting earlier, acting faster, and delivering care through technology designed for people — where they are, not where the system wishes they were.
Shouldn’t everyone, and certainly those 65+, be living in that world today?