Ask HN: Does increasing our life expectancy save or cost money?
In the light of the controversy arising from the recent New York Times article about the economic impact of preventative care, should we be asking this question too?
There's also no radical developments which change or automate prescribed or preventative care, with some illnesses resulting in very expensive hospital stays.
Healthcare salaries are also not expected to drop long-term, and will probably increase.
Cancer rates also go up as you age, resulting in chemotherapy and other expensive forms of healthcare and tests.
Insurance also fights to avoid paying out, and they're probably not keen to stop doing this, either. You generally become more expensive to insure as you age.
Healthcare law is also subject to intense debates within the US, and every change of administration brings risk of those laws changing.
Costs of developing drugs and procedures is also probably not going to go down either, resulting in pharma companies having to charge more per pill to recoup their costs (even if you ignore price gouging from Wall Street investors and free handouts to poor people).
And in the background, you have chronic illness costs (diabetes) and insurance premiums which always add up the longer you live. As well as environmental regulation and disasters which may expose you to harmful stuff.
Just ahead, in the next few years, there is the start of a massive shift in medicine for the old, medicine associated with the greatest costs. It is beginning now.
Call me skeptical, but we can't even treat Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and the leading cause of death in the US is still cardiovascular disease after decades of drug development
Plus, unless these drugs enable immortality I'd imagine they would just enable more people to live to older age, and then more people would get high cost illnesses
Does "increased life expectancy" mean more healthy, productive life or does it mean more time at the end in a hospital or nursing home? That would make a big difference, or so it seems to me.
The medicine of the past few decades has really aimed at doing just this, however, extending life without fixing the underlying problems. It is the heroic model of medicine, throw everything at the symptoms rather than the cause: compensating or patching over the problems, tinkering with metabolism, intervening in consequences or secondary contributing factors, but never going near the root causes.
It has been expensive. It has eked out only marginal, incremental gains. It is a history of failure dotted with the occasional hard-won success. It has conditioned people to think that this model is the only way forward. It is wrong, bad, and the research and development community need to adopt a better way forward.
I think that when senolytic therapies to clear senescent cells become more widely used, that will be a pleasant surprise - to find a pharmaceutical approach to age-related conditions that improves the situation for near all individuals and pathologies of aging, cost-effectively. It reduces inflammation, partially resolves loss of regenerative capacity, turns back atherosclerosis, restores loss of tissue elasticity to some degree, effectively treats osteoarthritis, clears out many forms of bad immune cell, removes a contributing cause of Parkinson's disease, and so for for a much longer list. The reason it will be so much better is that it targets a root cause of aging, a form of damage, and directly repairs at least some of it (25-50% in some tissues for some of the approaches).
One of the candidate therapies, dasatinib/quercetin, costs ~ $30-100 / dose. Take it once every few years.
I think it very hard to argue that this is going to cost the world money. The reason why present strategies have poor results is because they are terrible at achieving their goals. They have tiny effects. Do better, and the picture changes.
However, if and when life extension technologies are developed then we'll have preventative maintenance for the human body. Many common diseases and disabilities will be avoided plus we won't ever reach the geriatric care phase. The periodic choice would then be between more extension (relatively cheap) and assisted suicide (cheap). So this would save money.
The research I am excited about is to fight the aging process itself, which is the root cause of many costly/rough health problems old people have to live through. So if we find a novel way to extend life span and maybe in turn put a limit to the biological age, it would bring down the costs due to less cancer, dementia, etc.
So I’m really excited about the research in life extension. Although even if it works, it won't be easy to apply it 'correctly'.
I ask because at some point we could be asked to consider treatments that could take the "perfect health" score above 1.0. I'd argue that people who do potentially dangerous things like taking steroids already do something like this, valuing a "1.1" year of health now over a potential number of "0.5" years later.
And then, any country's life expectancy is based on a mixture of causes, e.g., I've read that it's declining in the US due to things like the opioid epidemic, suicide, and so forth.
We know at what age ranges people are most productive, and least productive.
Are we increasing the number of most productive years or least productive years? You know what the answer is.
Could you be more specific? Are you talking about a Hacker News thread or something else?