Health costs post-65

The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College published two papers on health care costs from age 65. Both papers used data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS).

"Nursing home care is the real wild card in assessing potential health care costs" is the keynote of the brief, "What Is the Distribution of Lifetime Health Care Costs from Age 65?" which calculates:

At age 65, a typical married couple free of chronic disease can expect to spend $197,000 on remaining lifetime health care costs – excluding nursing home care – while it faces a 5-percent probability that these costs will exceed $311,000. Including nursing home care, the mean cost is $260,000, with a 5-percent probability of costs exceeding $570,000.

In the working paper, "How Much Is Enough? The Distribution of Lifetime Health Care Costs," the same figures are carried forward for a couple age 85 who still face a 5 percent chance of remaining health care costs exceeding $477,000. It concludes: "The risk is not of destitution, but of health care costs impoverishing a couple or a surviving spouse, or of the household not having the retirement it planned for."


What is the Distribution of Lifetime Health Care Costs from Age 65?, March 2010
      Report (pdf, 7pp/112kB)
      Introduction

How Much Is Enough? The Distribution of Lifetime Health Care Costs, Feb. 2010
      Report (pdf, 45pp/1.8MB)
      Abstract