““For every year of added life that has been achieved since 1990, only 10 months is healthy.†Already nearly half of people aged fifty or more suffer from some chronic pain or disability. We have become much better at extending life, but not necessarily better at extending quality of life. Older people cost the economy a lot. In the United States, the elderly constitute just over a tenth of the population but fill half the hospital beds and consume a third of all the medicines. Falls among the elderly alone cost the U.S. economy $31 billion a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The time we spend in retirement has grown substantially, but the amount of work we do to fund it has not. The average person born before 1945 could expect to enjoy only about eight years of retirement before being permanently eliminated from the living, but someone born in 1971 can expect more like twenty years of retirement, and someone born in 1998 can, on current trends, expect perhaps thirty-five years—but all funded in each case by roughly forty years of labor. Most nations haven’t begun to face up to the long-term costs of all these unwell, unproductive people who just go on and on. We have, in short, a lot of problems ahead of us all, both personally and societally. Almost everywhere, overtreatment of dying people is routine. Among those dying of cancer in America, one in eight receives chemotherapy right up to the last two weeks of their lives, long past the point where it is effective. Three separate studies have shown that cancer sufferers receiving palliative care in their final weeks rather than chemotherapy actually live longer and suffer much less. Bryson, Bill. The Body (p. 382). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. The Body (p. 382). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. The Body (p. 369). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. The Body (p. 369). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”
