Time for a new old age

Gallup CEO Jim Clifton is really depressed. Here’s a test: what’s he talking about here?

It’s “killing us.”  

It’s “a ‘game over’ moment for America.”

If we can’t fix it, “everything else ceases to matter.”  

Climate change? The debt ceiling? An economic collapse, gay marriage, the UN taking away our guns and a nuclear Iran?

All wrong. Clifton was talking about something significantly more pedestrian, but potentially even scarier — the rising cost of health care.

Health care costs are climbing at a rocket-fueled rate of 7.5 percent per year and total around two and a half trillion dollars annually.

It’s the driving factor, along with weak revenue, in creating our massive federal debt.

We’re trying all kinds of things to slow it down, but nothing is working.

The problem is that nobody is addressing the real problem behind rising health care costs. People are living much longer than they used to, but they’re not living any healthier. We’re extending lives, but not youth.

This is where the economic debate on health care costs crashes into the scientific debate on life extension. In the past century, we’ve doubled the length of the human life, but the productive life hasn’t extended that much.  

Bennett Foddy, an Oxford philosopher, notes, “We’ve gotten good at keeping people alive once they’re fairly decrepit. And that sort of guarantees that you have the maximum drain on resources, while also producing the kind of minimum amount of human benefit.”  

In fact, the 1 percent of people who die every year use up 12 percent of that year’s health care spending.  

We should move our scientific community toward making humans live like the lobster.

Scientists generally think lobsters live as long as humans do. But they stop aging once they reach adulthood. Eighty-year-old lobsters look exactly like 18-year-old lobsters.

We all want Grandma and Grandpa around for as long as we can keep them. But it would be a lot nicer to have a spry, active set of grandparents than having them on life support.

We should focus on youth-extending medicine, not life-extending medicine. That way, in the words of Foddy, “We still live to be about 80 to 85, but we’re alert and active until we drop dead.”

A world in which people live relatively healthy lives until they’re 80 and die soon after, seems much preferable to a world in which people live healthy lives until they’re 60 — if they’re lucky — and then sick lives for the next 20 years.

We halfway-cure diseases like diabetes and heart disease, such that those afflicted require life-long continuous treatment. We further extend the lives of those on the brink of death for months, if not years, at a time. Then we promise to take care of the elderly on the public dime.

Our system is a perfect storm designed to engineer high health care costs.
It’s time we give the elderly better lives — bicycles instead of walkers, doing jobs they love instead of living in nursing homes they hate, spending time in their homes, rather than in their hospital beds.

We owe it to them, and we owe it to us to make like the lobster.
Oscar Wilde once said, “Youth is wasted on the young.” Let’s fix that.

­— shlumorgan@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Luke Morgan on Twitter @flukemorgan.