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Comment by lucas_membrane | Hacker News Reader

So improvements in healthcare and the rapid surge in lifespans resulting from spending on medical care improvements so that more people could enjoy what they looked forward to for many years, a long, happy and healthy retirement, ruined America? This is the kind of perverse analysis that typically arises as an unwelcome emergent property of systems controlled by people facing inflexible deadlines to meet equally inflexible and arbitrary constraints and goals.

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What long, happy, and healthy retirement? "Healthcare", like everything, is ironically named. It's actually sickness mitigation.

One of the things that economic demographers like to mutter about from time to time is that lifespan is going up, but healthspan is not. Women live longer than men, but approximately all of the extra is spent in a state of ill health.

I'm 75 years old, male, declining after being somewhat chronically ill for a long time, and I am still active socially and attending some organization meetings, exercising 10 hours/week, etc. AFAIK none of my male direct ancestors ever lived beyond 73. I have friends my age and considerably older, some of each sex, who are still climbing mountains and riding bicycles. When I was a kid, life expectancy was just flirting with 70, and the life insurance business was still implementing the change from the 1840's mortality table to the one that came out in 1941 -- that's how slowly things used to improve. About the time Medicare started, it looked like mortality improvement was slowing down, but that turned around for a few decades, allowing a much more significant gap between life expectancy and normal retirement age. Sorry, but YMMV.

In my childhood in the 1960s there were also many men in their seventies leading active lives as you describe - golfing, sailing, hiking and so on.

What there were not, was lots of people on oxygen or in wheelchairs or on dialysis or taking insulin daily. Lifespan is going up because we are keeping sick people alive for longer.

Do you think that those medical treatments disqualify anyone from living, or that many people receiving those treatments have not lived meaningful lives and done plenty of good work? The ideas that lead to thinking that we have too much healthcare are sustained by oligarchs of the medical industries who have raised the price of a vial of insulin from $1.48 during the 60's, 70's, and 80's to $275.00 now that bacteria make it much more economically than it was ever made before.

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