Good news: we’re living longer!

10Mar/104

Good news: we’re living longer!

Bad news: we're living longer!

From the Atlantic: the case for raising the retirement age. I could quote from the article, but I think the graph says everything necessary:

Graph of male life expectancy at age 65

Survivorship to age 65 is also a piece of the problem, but while that has improved, it's not improved as drastically as the life expectancy at older ages. There have been a few big mortality changes over the past 100 years or so: drastically reduced childhood mortality [due to vaccines, better public health], improved treatment for heart disease [so first heart attacks have been pushed back from 40s and 50s to the 60s], and then better health for the old.

This is all good, but there are financial repercussions - if you were planning to retire at age 60, you need to be prepared to live off your savings for 30 years. [at least...those expectancies are just the averages, and it's just for right now] Think you can do that?

And if you were expecting to live off someone else's earnings via Social Security and Medicare, first, those benefits aren't that cushy [and you end up having to pay a lot out of pocket with Medicare], and second, are you sure there will be enough people to live off of? Especially if these people are taking benefits at first eligibility at age 62?

The upside-down demographics are being worked through in Europe right now [example: Ireland]. Luckily, the U.S. has the leisure to watch those countries implode with their benefit designs before we reach our cliff. Sounds like fun.

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.

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Enoch_Root
March 10th, 2010 - 17:48

Whereas peeps used to die at the first bout with disease (or second) they are now being saved 5 or 6 times before finally giving up the ghost. Now it costs a lot to save people 5 or 6 times. And one wonders at what point those clawing to live forever are really barking at the moon.

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Roxeanne de Luca
March 11th, 2010 - 11:13

I’m grateful every day that three of my biological grandparents (and three of my step-grandparents) are alive and enjoying their lives.

And one wonders at what point those clawing to live forever are really barking at the moon.

Four years ago, my grandfather was almost gone. He was in and out of the hospital all the time, with more ailments than you could imagine. My mother had me make at least three emergency trips to see him – the “Please come down here right now, drop school, and see him before he dies; we think he’s hanging on so he can say good-bye to you.”

Four years later, he’s happy, doing better, living independently, and we are all thrilled that he’s had these years with us. I do think, however, that he’s the exception; most people simply don’t make come-backs like that.

Nevertheless, it’s been obvious for a long, long time that the math just doesn’t work out on Social Security and Medicare. (It’s worse with government work: work from 25 to 55, retire at 55 with a pension equal to 80% of your earnings from the top three years….?!) What I cannot understand is this business of not raising the retirement age (or at least the age to collect Social Security) a little bit every year or so. We should have started this process a decade ago.

The other things that people don’t understand is that SS was originally designed, in part, to help ensure that people didn’t out-live their money. You don’t actually need SS at age 62 when you should have money from a pension, savings, and a 401(k); you need it at age 80 when you’ve spent most of that and there’s no way that you can even get a part-time job to supplement your income.

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Enoch_Root
March 11th, 2010 - 15:52

As long as the quality of life is decent, I can’t fault anyone for wanting to trudge onward. But should we be fighting tooth and nail at 98 to defeat some disease that we barely survived 3 years earlier? I intend not that the govt should be making these decisions, but that individuals should be able to refrain from fighting for another day or hour if that hour really is at hand.

As for pensions – no such thing in the private sector.

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sg
March 16th, 2010 - 09:33

“The other things that people don’t understand is that SS was originally designed, in part, to help ensure that people didn’t out-live their money.”

He, he, I finally get it. Medicare actually creates the SS insolvency problem. If we didn’t have Medicare, people would have to save their own resources or get them from friends and relatives in order to pay for medical treatment. If those relatives were also their heirs, would they be more or less likely to use those resources or conserve them for the sake of their heirs? When the heirs are the collective of all of society it is easy to use the money to preserve oneself. However when those are one’s own heirs, one might be more in favor of conserving them for the benefit of their own heirs.

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