**5.1 Age**

Age describes how long one has lived on earth. A person's age is considered a critical factor influencing access to reliable healthcare financing. While it is possible for many working class age category not to have any challenge accessing reliable healthcare financing, some retirees may experience more difficulty accessing reliable healthcare financing. This is because the rate of poverty among older people is more than among other age categories due to the fact that many older people are in their economically inactive phase of life [24]. Since older people are less productive (especially the fourth agers), financial resources for healthcare financing tend to be affected. In addition, in some African countries, a person's age determines whether one will have social health protection or not. That is, provisions are made for older people in some African countries such as Ghana, Rwanda, and Senegal to be exempted from paying health insurance premium [25, 26]. This sort of arrangement increases older people's access to reliable healthcare financing. Age factor determining healthcare access was confirmed by a study in Ghana which discovered that enrolment for National Health Insurance Scheme exemption policy in Ghana was higher among the elderly which invariably increases access to healthcare among

**Figure 1.** *Factors influencing access to reliable healthcare financing in old age.*

#### *Factors Influencing Access to Reliable Healthcare Financing among Elderly Population in Africa DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99578*

older people [26]. Another study conducted among the middle-aged and older Chinese indicated that age-category of the elderly influences their chances of gaining access to reliable healthcare financing [7]. Therefore, as people aged, special consideration must be made in order to ensure that access to reliable healthcare financing is not denied.
