Our long-term financial problems primarily involve an increasing number of old, non-productive members of society relative to younger productive members.
Anything that allows people to live longer just adds to that problem.
I'd like to live a longer and healthier life as much as anybody, but if everybody goes to school till they're 25, works for 40 years and then retires at 65, living to 100, they're out of the workforce for 60% of their lifespan. The financial mechanics of this just don't work.
All true. If people want to live longer, they will *have to* retire later. The economics simply don’t work otherwise. (Of course, if people can have healthier bodies as they age, retiring at an older age would be less of a burden.)
Any treatments that may come out of this will probably be expensive at first, and thus only available to a few, minimizing their economic impact. But if the treatments obviously work, the pressure to make them available to everyone will be enormous. Eventually they will become common or even routine. That would necessitate a complete overhaul of retirement, pensions, Social Security, Medicare, etc.
The concept of an automatic retirement age would probably have to be dispensed with entirely. The remaining entities that provide defined benefit programs would almost certainly have to replace them with defined-contribution programs, particularly while there is uncertainty about how much people’s lifespans will be extended. (If actuaries can’t predict with some accuracy when people will die, it’s impossible to be determine how much funding a pension plan will need.)
Retirement would probably have to be redefined as occurring when you either (1) have acquired the resources to care for yourself indefinitely, or (2) are too sick or frail to work any more. Social Security and Medicare might even have to transform to disability-only programs, rather than providing automatic benefits to people who attain a particular age.
Still, as long as this research provides hope of treatments that reduce the suffering that many people now endure as they age, then the research *will* continue. The best we can do is try to plan for it rationally. And that will be tough. It will be particularly difficult to balance the needs of people who are already retired or are nearing retirement. They will be suffering from age-related health problems and want the life-extending treatments. However, they will want their expected retirement benefits, too. And neither their pension plans nor society will not be able to afford to pay those benefits over a longer retirement period. (We can’t even pay them as it is now.)
If I could have 80 years of perfect health, I’d be happy.
Now there’s a deal for ya: Take this pill and be perfectly healthy, but you have to commit to never accepting a dime of government money.
I think most people would go for that. Heck, if they were healthy and pain-free, they wouldn’t have to.