All of us aspire to age comfortably in our own homes, yet far too few Canadians achieve this goal. According to health columnist Steven Lewis, this isn't a simple system failure but a direct result of public policy choices that prioritize costly institutional care over supporting people to remain at home.
The Parallel Decline: Baseball and Senior Care
The COVID-19 pandemic tragically highlighted the vulnerabilities in sub-standard long-term care homes, which should only be a last resort. However, the initial shock and demand for major reform have since faded. Lewis draws a compelling parallel to another institution facing an aging crisis: Major League Baseball.
Once the undisputed king of American professional sports, baseball's dominance waned. In a 1937 Gallup Poll, 34% of U.S. adults named baseball their favourite sport. But by 2023, that figure had plummeted to around 10%, with football leading at 41%. Among young adults aged 18-29, only 5% preferred baseball, placing it behind even soccer.
Lewis defines successful aging for people as retaining capacities and participating fully in life. For a sports league, it means attracting new generations of fans and young athletes. Baseball, despite integrating and pioneering data analytics (the "Moneyball" revolution), was slow to address its symptoms of decline: games lacked action, dragged on for over three hours on average, and strategies like the infield shift stifled offense. For eight consecutive years, strikeouts outnumbered hits—a streak only broken in 2025.
A Blueprint for Change in Health Policy
The author points to baseball's recent, more aggressive reforms as a model. The league finally implemented changes to restore pace and action, recognizing that nostalgia wasn't enough to ensure its future. Similarly, Lewis argues, the health and social care system must shift its fundamental incentives.
Current policies spend more to move seniors out of their homes than to keep them in, and more on expensive hospital stays than on preventive strategies to avoid them. This misalignment, he contends, is the core "feature" preventing successful aging for the population.
The cultural disconnect is starkly illustrated by social media influence: basketball star LeBron James has 160 million Instagram followers, while baseball's extraordinary two-way talent Shohei Ohtani has 10 million. The lesson for health care is that excellence alone isn't sufficient if the system's design is flawed.
The Path Forward for Canada
Just as baseball had to confront its slowing pace and lack of engagement head-on, Canadian health policy requires a proactive overhaul. The goal must be to re-engineer funding and support systems to make "aging in place" the default, successful outcome, not an elusive ideal. The late innings of life, like a baseball game, should build to a rewarding crescendo, not a protracted decline.
The time for incremental change has passed. The blueprint for revitalization, Lewis suggests, lies in learning from unexpected sectors—like a historic sport that rediscovered how to captivate a new generation.
