Good health lasts later in life
This is what many people imagine old age looks like in America — a painful, years-long battle with debilitating disease, marked by a gradual loss of the ability to care for yourself, repeated stays in hospitals, and a crippling price tag. For an increasing number of people, however, that’s not the reality, says David Cutler, the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics. Based on data collected between 1991 and 2009 from nearly 90,000 responses to the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), Cutler says he has found that, even as life expectancy has increased over the past two decades, people have become increasingly healthy later in life. He worked on the findings with Mary Beth Landrum of Harvard Medical School and Kaushik Ghosh of the National Bureau of Economic Research. “With the exception of the year or two just before death, people are healthier than they used to be,” Cutler said. “Effectively, the period of time...