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Longer lifespans may not mean higher health costs
September 11, 2003 More
"golden years" do not cost the health care system more, federal
researchers say - whether people are healthy at age 70 and live
independently for many more years or are sickly and die sooner, their
medical costs are about the same. The
findings have big implications for taxpayers, because they suggest that
the outlook for the Medicare program as America's baby boomers grow old is
not as dire as some policy-makers feared. Given
projections saying the baby boom generation will bankrupt the Medicare
trust fund in about 25 years, politicians and economists have wondered
whether the increasing longevity of healthier senior citizens would
increase or reduce Medicare spending. The
answer is neither, say researchers at the National Center for Health
Statistics. They
found medical expenses from age 70 until death averaged $140,700, with
little difference between active, long-lived senior citizens and disabled
ones - except for those already in a nursing home. "The
basic lesson of our study is that although healthy people live longer,
they don't cost more in the long run," said Jim Lubitz, acting chief
of the Aging Studies Branch in the statistics center's Office of Analysis,
Epidemiology and Health Promotion. "Improving health should be the
overall goal of our health care policy, but it's not going to save the
Medicare system." Sandra
Decker, a researcher at the International Longevity Center-USA, said
Medicare costs will rise because of the sheer number of beneficiaries, not
their longer life span. "It
means, yes, we'll spend more on Medicare, but maybe not as much more as we
thought," she said. Uwe
Reinhardt, a professor and health economist at Princeton University, said
70-year-olds today have far fewer disabilities than their counterparts a
couple of decades ago, when economist Victor R. Fuchs first reported that
longevity does not affect health-care spending much. Reinhardt said the
new study provides updated numbers on those costs. The
study was reported in today's New England Journal of Medicine. Decker
noted that while better medicine and lifestyle have made senior citizens
healthier over the past few decades, the study's findings may not be valid
20 years from now because of the epidemic of obesity, diabetes and heart
disease among middle-aged Americans. Average
life expectancy in this country hit a record 77.2 years in 2001, and by
2030, the number of Americans 65 or older will reach 71 million, according
to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
