As medicine improves - and improves faster thanks to the efforts of researchers, educators, businesspeople, advocates and other pro-research folks - we will have access to ever more options for living longer, healthy lives. Those options are unlikely to be free, however, especially in the early years of availability. The cost of any given medical treatment drops as marketplace competition sets in and the technology is improved, but most medical expenses require planning.

That said, what sort of medical expenses should you plan on for a future that involves real anti-aging medicine? If I knew the answer, I'd go into business as a fortune teller (and make a killing on the stock market). I think, however, that there are some useful guesstimates that we can make based upon possible events down the road, the plausible future of regenerative medicine, and the way in which medical pricing has behaved in the past.

• The current cost of a major medical procedure that does not require extensive, long-term hospitalization is around $100,000 to $200,000. This may sound like a lot of money, but remember that it's quite possible to find yourself a millionaire late in life - even on a modest income - if you make good choices about saving for retirement. "The power of compound interest" is a phrase often used in those pro-401K leaflets.

• You should not expect insurance or governments to pay for real anti-aging treatments when they become available. They might do it, or they might not. There are several proposed future scenarios under which the medical insurance industry and government programs are bankrupted or forced into reform by extended healthy life spans. "Forced into reform" is a polite euphemism for "we are not paying for your treatment." The power of compound interest allows you to accumulate a great deal of money before you will need to spend it on retirement and future medical technologies - so make best use of your time and save wisely.

• The trend today is towards more regulation and price controls on medicine (which translates to scarcities, less investment in research, expensive products, and poor quality of service). If this trend continues, it means that we can expect more and more countries to look like Canada or France, in which low-grade medicine is free, but complex, new medical technologies are unavailable to the public. Once again, this indicates that you should save enough money to pay for expected medical expenses ... plus transport costs to a place with a more sensible government.

• The first wave of healthy life extension technologies will most likely be based on regenerative medicine and damage repair rather than damage prevention. Starting from this point, we can guess that the worst case scenario is that you will have to pay for replacement or major repair for each major organ in your body during this first wave period. If we believe that the costs for future regenerative medicine will be similar to current transplant costs, then that is a chunk of change. We can go back and forth on costs, but I'd start with $1,000,000 as a nice, round guesstimate.

• While $1,000,000 is a scary, scary number, the best case scenario may be much better depending on your age. If you have 50 years to go before you expect to need even one major medical procedure, then you're in good shape and will probably not even have to take advantage of first wave regenerative medicine. If you are only a decade or two away from your first expected major medical procedure, then you have plans to make.

• There are good reasons for believing that costs will remain much the same for major new medical procedures. Very little of that money actually goes towards technology and materials (no matter what that bill says). Most of it pays for people, time, expertise and organizational overhead. Those items tend to remain more consistant across the years even as the underlying technologies, skills and materials change.

• There is a great deal you can do to give yourself the best chance at good health in old age. If you are planning on spending money on new anti-aging technologies, why hamper yourself with costly, avoidable conditions? Take care of the health basics and you'll save an enormous amount of money. Prevention is far better (and cheaper) than cures.
  

What about paying for the rest of your retirement? Well, if you're happy, healthy and active, why retire? Life goes on, and eternal play is just as boring as eternal work. It will be interesting to see how things evolve.

As a last word, predicting the future is has long been shown to be a job in which random number generators and chimps do as well as humans. Regulation, societies, research and economies could diverge off into any number of unexpected directions, both good and bad. I hope these points demonstrate that you should be thinking about scenarios involving future medicine and the associated costs now, however, no matter what your age and status.

Posted by Reason at March 22, 2004 7:21 PM | TrackBack (2)