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The last point seems to depend on a lot of assumptions. Simply making someone healthier for longer doesn't automatically save money: someone who dies of a heart

The last point seems to depend on a lot of assumptions. Simply making someone healthier for longer doesn't automatically save money: someone who dies of a heart attack before age 65 is actually the best financial case for Medicare, and improving their health moderately so that they still have heart disease, but it doesn't kill them until age 75, will cost more! Improving their health even more than that, so that they don't have heart disease, but die of cancer at age 85 after 9 months of chemotherapy and 3 months on life support, is more expensive still.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Well, admittedly, I was kind of assuming that we're "going in" having already ruled out saving healthcare money by causing people to die prematurely. But do you happen to know of a graph or table or something on the fiscal trade-offs between health, life-span, and spending on care, which would demonstrate that even if someone remains in very good health until they die, simply having them alive longer costs so much money that it would be preferable to spend less and have them die earlier?
reasonattlm 12y ago
Prevention and repair of the root causes of aging should postpone age-related disease, and thereby reduce expenditure. The overwhelming majority of expense occurs in the very late stages of death by aging, dealing with a failing body due to overwhelming levels of cellular and molecular damage and the various systems flailing in response to that damage. If a person never gets to that point, if they can have a health profile that is effectively the same as a 30-40 year old in perpetuity, then the expense remains that way too. Incremental advances towards that ideal will have incremental benefits in terms of cost of medicine over time. None of which changes the fact that entitlement programs are a great evil, and put perverse incentives on the development and provision of services. Technologies enabling us to live for centuries in near perfect health will result in of course a vastly increased lifetime medical cost over the present horrible situation. Why should that be an issue? It should be a grand opportunity for providers of services, just as it should be for food companies, clothing companies, and so on. But instead we have these present debates in which people actually seriously argue that it's great for people to die young.
jljljl 12y ago
Unless, of course, better late life health allows people to work longer or contribute more to the economy in some way. In which case the impact on Medicare of healthy 65 y/o might not be so bad.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

Well, admittedly, I was kind of assuming that we're "going in" having already ruled out saving healthcare money by causing people to die prematurely. But do you happen to know of a graph or table or something on the fiscal trade-offs between health, life-span, and spending on care, which would demonstrate that even if someone remains in very good health until they die, simply having them alive longer costs so much money that it would be preferable to spend less and have them die earlier?

reasonattlm 12y ago

Prevention and repair of the root causes of aging should postpone age-related disease, and thereby reduce expenditure. The overwhelming majority of expense occurs in the very late stages of death by aging, dealing with a failing body due to overwhelming levels of cellular and molecular damage and the various systems flailing in response to that damage. If a person never gets to that point, if they can have a health profile that is effectively the same as a 30-40 year old in perpetuity, then the expense remains that way too. Incremental advances towards that ideal will have incremental benefits in terms of cost of medicine over time. None of which changes the fact that entitlement programs are a great evil, and put perverse incentives on the development and provision of services. Technologies enabling us to live for centuries in near perfect health will result in of course a vastly increased lifetime medical cost over the present horrible situation. Why should that be an issue? It should be a grand opportunity for providers of services, just as it should be for food companies, clothing companies, and so on. But instead we have these present debates in which people actually seriously argue that it's great for people to die young.

jljljl 12y ago

Unless, of course, better late life health allows people to work longer or contribute more to the economy in some way. In which case the impact on Medicare of healthy 65 y/o might not be so bad.