The painful triangle

Today would have been my Uncle Jim's birthday, so I was thinking about life and death.

I often think better in pictures, and I have been listening a lot to the debates on pensions, things like how much to contribute, how much to get back, when to draw it.

I have come to the conclusion that we have got ourselves into a painful triangle, where the only winners are the drug manufacturers and medical equipment suppliers.

I will be interested in how many agree and what solutions you offer.

This is how I see it

Let's start at the base of the triangle and more around anti clockwise.

We now have really good healthcare, but it costs a lot, because of the new drugs.  The fact is, the better they work, the longer we live, and the longer we take them, and the more it costs. So it is in the drug companies interest to provide expensive drugs that really work well.

Because we live longer, we need the finances to support us, that means we will need to put more money into our pension pot, and we will need medicines for longer.


Say we start earning at 21 and retire at 67. That is 46 years earning. Average life expectancy is now around 80-85, and getting better every year. So there has to be enough cash to support us for about 15 years, that's about a third of our working life. If we were to put that cash in a box under the bed, then we would have to be putting away about a third of every weeks earnings to fund our retirement. Of course, the third we put away in our early years will not play a significant part in our nest egg, because of inflation. And, the longer we live the greater proportion of our earnings we will have to put away.

Now we are back to the base again. Because we are living longer, we will need medical treatment for longer. In addition the problems will be worse, and they will need more expensive treatment.

In summary, the longer we live, the more money we will have to contribute to the health service and the more we will have to put away for a pension, so the less spare money we will have, to enjoy our young healthy time of life.

If we put the emphasis on managing the quality of dying, rather than extending a painful miserable life, we would have a lot more spare money to enjoy in the prime of our life.

Of course the down side of this, is that the drug companies would not become so mega rich!