[quote]As of 2006, a US citizen’s life expectancy at the age of 60 was 23.78 years. So, we can probably say that it’s about 24 years today.[/quote]

20.70 for males and 23.78 for females.

To compensate for that, the retirement age was raised, and the social security tax was raised repeatedly (from 3% during Kennedy times to 6.2% since 1990).

The real problem is on the Medicare side. Compared with 1935, people live longer because they receive lots of sophisticated and expensive treatments during late years of their lives, treatments that didn’t exist back then. And it’s going to get worse. Right now a single organ transplant costs on the order of $100,000. Medicare is only spared the massive expenses of having to transplant new hearts, lungs and livers to every second elderly patient at some point in their lives because of a severely limited supply of donor organs. But we have lots of biotech companies working on artificial organs (making them from scratch or growing them from patient’s stem cells). Imagine the cost dynamic when those organs go mainstream.