When good news is bad

Chicago Sun-Times: "Forty years from now, women will live 89.2 to 93.3 years; and men, 83.2 to 85.9 years — driven by ongoing advances in both treatment of major fatal diseases and slowing of the aging process — according to the report in a journal of health and health policy, The Milbank Quarterly."

Life expectancy today stands at 80 to 81 for women; 75 to 76 for men. So women are projected to live about 10 years longer, and men almost as long.

“Change is coming,” said one of the authors of the MacArthur Foundation-funded study, Dr. S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor.
“It’s going to come rapidly, and it’s going to begin in 2011 when the baby boomers begin to retire,” Olshansky said. “It’s going to have a dramatic negative effect on health, the national economy, and key government programs and institutions like Social Security and Medicare.”

When you add longer life expectancies to, what, 76 million baby boomers, wow! Medicare and Social Security outlays will expand dramatically. The United States will be an aging society with people over age 60 outnumbering those under age 15. Sounds like an inverted population pyramid, to me.

The study is apparently not available online.