Humans Living Longer but Life Quality Suffers
December 28, 2017
Here is an article that offers some thoughts worth pondering. The Daily Herald published, “Study: Americans Are Retiring Later, Dying Sooner And Sicker In Between”. It takes a look at how Americans are forced to retire at later ages than their parents because the retirement age keeps getting pushed up. Since retirement is being put off, it allows people to ideally store away more finances for their eventual retirement. The problem, however, is that retirees are not able to enjoy themselves in their golden years, instead, they are forced to continue working in some capacity or deal with health problems.
Despite being one of the world’s richest countries and having some of the best healthcare, Americans’ health has deteriorated in the past decade. Here are some neighbors to make you cringe:
University of Michigan economists HwaJung Choi and Robert Schoeni used survey data to compare middle-age Americans’ health. A key measure is whether people have trouble with an “activity of daily living,” or ADL, such as walking across a room, dressing and bathing themselves, eating, or getting in or out of bed. The study showed the number of middle-age Americans with ADL limitations has jumped: 12.5 percent of Americans at the current retirement age of 66 had an ADL limitation in their late 50s, up from 8.8 percent for people with a retirement age of 65.
Also, Americans’ brains are rotting with an 11 percent increase in dementia and other cognitive declines in people from 58-60 years old. Researchers are not quite sure what is causing the decline in health, but they, of course, have a lot of speculation. These include alcohol abuse, suicide, drug overdoses, and, the current favorite, increased obesity.
The real answer is multiple factors, such as genes, lifestyle, stress, environment, and diet. All of these things come into play. Despite poor health quality, we can count on more medical technological advances in the future. The aging population maybe the test grounds and improve the golden years of their grandchildren.
Whitney Grace, December 28, 2017
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