Leeraar wrote:I was interested to find this in The Economist print edition of Aug 23-29:
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-a ... ey-or-your
... Such statistics are enough to send a pension trustee to an early grave. Yet there is an apparent cure, in the form of “longevity swaps”, which pension schemes can use to insure against the risk that their members will live longer than expected. In July, the pension scheme of BT, Britain’s former telecoms monopoly, which is wrestling with a deficit of £7 billion ($12 billion), offloaded the longevity risk on over a quarter of its liabilities to Prudential Financial, an American insurer. BT will pay Prudential a monthly fee and it in turn will pay the extra pension costs if the shuffleboarders in question live longer than forecast.
Maybe BobK and I are the only ones interested in this. But, since Prudential now holds my ex-GM pension as an annuity, I am interested that they will take on insuring others for their geezer liabilities.
As a potentially unallowed comment: The cancer drugs now in the news that cost $100,000 per year or more will put a strain on pension systems and SS in that they extend life, in addition to the obvious strain on health care costs.
And, by the way, I do not understand the graphic in The Economist article. Explanations will be appreciated.
L.
There is misperception in these statistics.
The revolution in life expectancy is that a lot of people who used to die young, don't, any more. That plus certain public health offensives: air pollution, asbestos and smoking in particular. Each of these has had a measurable effect on premature death rates in adults.
That plus medicare and SS means Americans who make it to 65 are quite likely to make it to 80-something.
But there has not been a revolution in how many people live past 85 say. It's not that we've made it possible for humans to live past their alloted span (say around 100 years) it's just we've worked out how to get more people to that age.
It is also, btw, quite likely to go dramatically backwards. Ebola and SARS are merely the first of a wave of zoonotic diseases (see David Quammen's book, which is really good) that are going to hit the human race. History shows that when you get 10 billion large anythings, and there will be 10 billion of us, that the things that prey on them also multiply (and adapt very rapidly). Since humans are the apex of the predatory tree, that means the diseases that prey on us-- a human is just a cold virus' way of replicating and spreading itself.
If you look at the data on effectiveness of antibiotics and the number of 'curable' diseases that now have an incurable strain (tuberculosis) then you can see that our big gains in life expectancy are likely to be in abbeyance.
Imagine being in a world, as we were pre 1945, where a routine surgical procedure had a high chance of death due to infection. We are returning to that world very fast.
I haven't even mentioned the rise in 'diseases of affluence'. In particular obesity and diabetes. In which the US, UK, Canada lead the world, btw.