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August 26, 2015 at 06:13 AM
Public and private organizations seem to conduct an endless series of health surveys, surveys of older Americans, and surveys focusing on the health of older Americans.
But the data users have complained about lack of coordination, and gaps in the data. One source of irritation has been a lack of information about how long older U.S. residents can expect to live free from any major disabling conditions.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published some data suggesting that U.S. residents’ healthy lifespan has been increasing along with their overall lifespan.
See also: CDC Charts Progress at Increasing Years of Healthy Life
But researchers elsewhere have found evidence that U.S. residents might be living longer while dealing with more disabling conditions. Those researchers’ work implied that sellers of private long-term care insurance (LTCI), for example, might find that a higher percentage of their insureds were living with severe disabilities longer.
See also: MetLife: High-income Americans look sicker
But Michael Chernew, a Harvard University economist, and three other researchers have published an interesting study, on the National Bureau of Economic Research website, on years of disability-free life expectancy in the U.S. elderly population.
They defined “disability” to refer to anyone unable to to handle any activity of daily living (ADL), such as getting from a bed to a wheelchair, or any instrumental activity of daily living (IADL), such as going shopping. The researchers used data from the period for 1992 through 2009 to estimate how many years an individual turning 65 in various years could expect to live with or without a disability.
The researchers found that overall life expectancy at age 65 increased 1.3 years, to 18.8 years, from 17.5 years.
The number of expected disabled life years fell to 8 years toward the end of the period, from 8.5 years at the beginning.
The number of disability-free years increased to 10.8 years, from 9 years.
Of course, the category that includes “all Americans,” “all older Americans,” or even “all older Americans who have private LTCI” is much different from the category of people who have gone to the trouble to apply for, and pay for, private LTCI. Insuers are just starting to pore through a big batch of LTCI experience data.
See also: Actuaries post LTCI terminations study
Even if the Americans born around 1920 ended up with more years of disability-free life than those born around 1905, that does not necessarily mean that improvement in disability-free life expectancy will continue to improve for the generations brought up with television sets in the playroom and fast food for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
But the Chernew team has found some evidence for optimism about the well-being of older Americans.
For some of the details from their research, read on.
1. The last three years of life look a lot better than the last year of life.
About 80 percent of Medicare enrollees who were in their last 12 months of life had problems with at least one ADL or one IADL in 2009, and that percentage did not change much from the early 1990s through 2009.
The disability rate for Medicare enrollees who are more than 36 months away from death fell to less than 40 percent, from about 50 percent, and the disability rate for enrollees who had 24 to 36 months to live fell to about 70 percent, from 75 percent.
