My blog is a nothing compared with the power of analysis you can get from the FT and other seriously good papers we produce in this country. Thanks to Alan Chaplin, Pension PlayPen and this blog have had some interest, especially from Stephen Bush, a columnist and editor who is showing an interest in getting old which I find gratifying. I hope that some of the brilliant thought in the comments of this blog will get to him and inspire more articles like the one below.

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Dying is an art (that is really expensive)

Thanks for all the terrific responses to Monday’s newsletter. There was a particularly good question from one reader, Jim, that I wanted to talk about: it is easy to misread our care dependency ratios and to think

“we become steadily more expensive from 70 onwards”

rather than

“at some point from 70 onwards we are likely to do something expensive”.

That “something” is “get sick and eventually die”, as Jim asks:

Most folks cost very little to maintain other than pensions, then costs increase culminating in an exceptionally expensive final 18 months. With increasing longevity and better health, that exceptionally expensive period is shifting later. But that’s simply moving a cost, not necessarily increasing the cost.

So are the costs vs age charts below to some extent reflecting the blend, or proportion, of individuals in the relevant cohort who are in a “maintenance phase” vs the last 18 months?

Here’s the chart again for those who missed Monday’s note:

The answer is essentially yes — one thing that the world has done exceptionally well is get much, much better at preventing the cheaper ways we used to die.

Road safety is much improved, and far fewer of us die from our first heart attack — or from cardiovascular problems in general.

There’s a greater cost coming down the track, though, which is that the next cohort of pensioners are essentially too old to have benefited from auto-enrolment or seen their state pension become significantly more generous thanks to the triple lock, but are too young to have benefited from a defined benefit pension.

Means-tested pensioner benefits are going to go up, even if you assume that no government feels an electoral or ideological need to stop people becoming destitute: even with current eligibility, there will be greater numbers of pensioners in future claiming pension credit than there are right now.

The reason why this matters is that there is good cause to be sceptical whenever someone justifies spending more money on health

“because it will pay off later down the line”.

We should be concerned about people having longer, healthier lives because that is a good in and of itself, but the reality is that what really drives healthcare costs, and therefore public spending, is dying, and what drives much of our welfare spending is inadequate private pensions.

If you want the state to spend less, then those are really the big targets you need to hit

Stephen.bush@ft.com