The Short-Term Economic Argument for Undertaking Efforts to Treat Aging as a Medical Condition

The primary economic argument presently made for treating aging as a medical condition emerges from the fact that medical spending and medical research is largely entwined with government in much of the world; it is increasingly a public purse, not a collection of private purses. Politicians and bureaucrats care (to some degree) about avoiding the looming financial implosion that will result when present unsustainable spending policies run head-on into the demographic transition to a society in which an ever-larger proportion of people are old, suffering from age-related disease, and many of their expenses paid via entitlement programs. Reducing the burden of old age reduces the costs to public health programs. Sadly, this seems to be a lot more motivating to many people than the goal of reducing the incidence of human suffering and death. There is a much larger and more important economic argument to be made regarding the costs of age-related death and disease, not just the expenses, but the lost opportunities, the lost progress and knowledge. This cost dwarfs the expenditures of the world's government health services; recent estimates suggested that merely delaying aging by a single year would save $38 trillion per year, just by marginally reducing the present enormous costs of coping with the universal progression to dysfunction and death in later life. Yet this economic argument is met with shrugs, and is much less motivating to those who find themselves in the pos...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs