| Home |
Articles | Does Staying Healthy Reduce Your Lifetime Health Care Costs?
|
Does Staying Healthy Reduce Your Lifetime Health Care Costs?
May 13, 2010
Medical and long-term care costs represent a substantial uninsured risk for most
retired households.
A recemt brief from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College
explores the relationship between health care costs and health status.
That is, it considers whether current good health is a predictor of low health
care costs over one's remaining lifetime. If so, healthy households could
set aside less for health care expenditures than the unhealthy, and households
that stay healthy could release for general consumption money that they had
previously set aside for health care costs.
The main finding is that although the current health care costs of healthy
retirees are lower than those of the unhealthy, the healthy actually face higher
total health care costs over their remaining lifetime.
To illustrate, the expected present value of lifetime health care costs for a
couple turning 65 in 2009 in which one or both spouses suffer from a chronic
disease is $220,000, including insurance premiums and the cost of nursing home
care, and 5 percent can expect to spend more than $465,000. The comparable
numbers for couples free of chronic disease are substantially higher, at
$260,000 and $570,000, respectively.
This brief explains this somewhat counterintuitive finding and can be downloaded here (6 page PDF) from the Center for
Retirement Research at Boston College.
| 
Overview - CSRS
