The New Math

 

I am fifty-seven, soon to be fifty-eight. I got to thinking the other day, for no particular reason, about how many people who were born in 1953 are still alive. I did a little research and found some data generated by the CDC, the Center for Disease Control.  

They provide a whole bunch of information, and specifically for this conversation, life tables that suggest how we in this culture at this time are faring. The numbers I provide here are estimates from those tables. They are not exact. If I worked for an insurance company, I am sure that I would be fired for being sloppy, but for a personal blog entry, they are reasonable "ball park" figures. 

So the CDC says that 10% of the people who were born in the same year I was are dead by now. I would have thought more than that, so that's not bad. While it took 57 years for that 10% to die, I might expect the another 10% of that original group to die off in the next 12 years, by the time I'm 69. 30% of the group will be gone by the time I'm 74, 40% at 78, 50% at 82, 60% at 85, 70% at 88, 80% at 91, and 90% at 94. Less than 3% of those I was born with will make it to 100.

That's for everybody in the U.S.. Elsewhere in the world the numbers would be very different. If you cared to look at the numbers for just the guys in the U.S., they would be about 2 to 3 years ahead of that pace and have half the chance of living to 100.

Another way of looking at the data would be to consider that at age 57, I have about a 50/50 chance of living another 25 years, 80% chance of living another 15 years and about a 98% chance of living another 5 years. There is of course a 100% chance that I will be dead sooner or later.

So if I am on an east bound train traveling from San Francisco at 106 miles per hour, and you are on a west bound train traveling from Baltimore at  87 miles per hour, how much should we have to spend on health insurance and will there be any money left when we die? 

This is the real life question that Sand and I had to answer this past week as we went shopping for health insurance to replace the coverage that we used to have when I was a respectable employed person.

You may be interested to know that we were in total agreement on our answer, which was "yes."